


two of fixed points

by redluxite (wordstruck)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Moderate depictions of violence, Pining Shiro (Voltron), Pre-Kerb to Canon, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Red String of Fate, Slow Burn, Soulmates AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstruck/pseuds/redluxite
Summary: So why the Garrison,Shiro asks, then, casually picking up a French fry.Why here,is what he means, why here specifically where he’d landed himself in Shiro’s life and turned it upside-down, why here where he’d quietly and unobtrusively inserted himself in the spaces between Shiro’s ribs. Keith hadn’t happened to Shiro in the same way as most other things that have changed his life so irrevocably. He’d snuck up on Shiro like a peculiar stray cat, there and thentherein Shiro’s life, taking up more and more room.(this fic: and then they were soulmatesall of you, who knew this from the beginning: oh my god they were soulmates)





	1. before

**Author's Note:**

> _When you fall in love with your soulmate, a red string appears around your left ring finger._  
>  Hello and welcome to my entry for the SBB 2018! I've held onto the title and premise of this fic since I first got into the VLD fandom, and I'm v happy to have finished this ^ ^ I hope you like it. The fic contains a lot of my personal HCs of Keith, Shiro, and their relationship – including their ages. Since it was planned and the bulk of it written before S6/7, so it's **not canon-compliant** with any information from then. In here, Keith's about 16/17 when he first meets Shiro, who's about 20/21. 
> 
> The fic also compiles a lot of little details and snippets from the one-shots I've written over the months since my first VLD fic! If you notice stuff that seems familiar, that's why – I put them in as little Easter eggs/callbacks.
> 
> Big, special thank yous to Kay ([mylittleskeletons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleskeletons)) and Lexi ([@Lexificlets](https://twitter.com/Lexificlets) on Twitter) for beta-ing this fic for me ❤︎ And to everyone who kept me sane while I was writing. You're all wonderful.
> 
> Much love and gratitude also to my artists, Anchy ([anaake-art](http://anaake-art.tumblr.com/)) and Draco ([@Mikudraco](https://twitter.com/Mikudraco)) for picking my fic and illustrating it! I'll be linking their works in as they go up. Please check them out and show them some love!! You're both so amazing T__T ❤︎❤︎
> 
> ART BY Anchy **[here](http://anaake-art.tumblr.com/post/177522220969/for-sheithbigbang-two-of-fixed-points-when)**  
>  ART BY Draco **[here](https://dracosh50.tumblr.com/post/177575760253/heres-what-i-did-for-the-sheithbigbang-with)**
> 
> Art banner is by me aha XD Any further errors will be edited retrospectively.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro suppresses a wince. He tucks his hand back into his pants pockets and smiles, casting about for something to say. There’s a tiny bruise starting to bloom on the high ridge of Keith’s cheek.
> 
> “Where’d you learn to fight like that?” Shiro asks. His fingers flex, fighting the strangest urge to run a thumb over the purpling mark and see if it won’t smudge away.
> 
> Keith’s eyes cut away. One corner of his mouth curls. “Around.”

* * *

 

 

 

 

If asked, both Shiro and Keith will say they met because of Keith’s sim scores.

It’s a perfectly believable, perfectly acceptable story. Nobody thinks twice about it, nobody asks for more. Shiro’s smile is a small curl at the corner of his mouth.

Reality is far more intriguing, of course.

 

.o0o.

 

Shiro’s out on an errand for Lieutenant Ryu, picking up some reference texts from the small bookstore in town. He _technically_ doesn’t have to; the Garrison has staff to handle deliveries, and while minor tasks like these do fall within a junior officer’s purview, most of them don’t bother. But Shiro likes to be helpful, likes to keep himself in his senior officers’ good books and make a good impression.

( _Garrison’s Golden Boy isn’t above ingratiation,_ Matt teases him, as he carries a stack of papers into the research lab. He’s leaning back on the rear legs of his chair; Shiro smirks and nudges him off-balance. Matt’s indignant squawk drowns out Shiro’s laughter.)

He’s no suck-up, but Shiro knows being well-liked and reliable has its advantages.

Like, say, using an errand into town as an excuse to go on a snack run.

It’s well past roll call and lights-out now, but junior officer privileges allow him this much, and the references won’t be needed until tomorrow afternoon. So he takes his time picking up his favorite snacks, a bottle of rum and some wine coolers (what Iverson doesn’t know won’t hurt him). A quick bout of consideration and he adds in a couple of Mars Bars, just in case he needs to bribe Matt for something in the future.

He finishes up his burger on the curb outside the convenience store, checks his packages, and goes to throw his trash in the dumpster behind the store.

The boy half-hidden behind it stares at him like a deer caught in headlights.

Shiro blinks, equally caught off-guard.

They look at each other for a few moments, in which Shiro realizes three things:

> One, that this boy is a cadet – he’s halfway through changing out of the uniform and into well-worn jeans and a red jacket;
> 
> Two, that cadets aren’t allowed off the Garrison grounds past roll call, outside of class requirements and officially sanctioned business; and,
> 
> Three, that this boy isn’t here for either of those reasons, and he knows that Shiro knows this.

Shiro’s aware that he should call the cadet out for violating at least two different Garrison regulations, but he’s a little distracted, impressed that a cadet had the audacity to leave the Garrison when Iverson is on roll call duty.

(Besides, it’s not like Shiro has much room to talk. He was supposed to return to the Garrison two hours ago.)

Before he can say anything, or reassure the kid that no, he’s not going to tell, the cadet gathers up his stuff and books it out the other end of the alley. Shiro’s left standing there with his confusion and curiosity and the burger wrapper still in his hand, forgotten.

 

When he gets back to the Garrison, he considers loitering by the basement entrance to the cadet dorms – the one he knows is notoriously easy to pick open – to catch the kid on his way back. But there are too many downsides to that plan, not the least because the kid might have already come back, or might not be back for hours yet.

He might not even come back at all, but somehow Shiro doubts that.

He makes his way back to the junior officers’ dorm instead, and hopes that he can put a name to the face soon enough. It’d be nice to meet the person behind that reckless brand of bravery.

(He’d also like to know how the hell the kid had gotten off Garrison grounds, but Shiro’s not about to admit to that.)

 

The universe is apparently being kind to him, because Shiro gets a chance just a few days later.

 

Friday nights at the Garrison aren’t usually the most exciting. Shiro’s often on junior officer duty or doing something for class. But on the nights when he’s free, he likes coming to the rec gym for a workout, sometimes a sparring match or two.

When he gets to the gym that night, he finds something far more interesting.

There’s a small crowd gathered around the sparring mats on the far side of the room, past the gym equipment. Shiro wanders over, curious. It’s mostly a crowd of junior officers, although he recognizes some of the recently-promoted seniors over on one of the benches.

Must be a good match.

A cheer and some laughs ripple through the crowd, and Shiro weaves his way to one of the benches so he can see what’s going on. As he drops his stuff to the floor, he turns to look at whoever it is that’s sparring.

One glance at the two people on the mats, and Shiro inhales sharply in surprise.

The junior officer is a friend of Shiro’s, from the engineering class. Shiro’s sparred against Matias enough times to know he has good reflexes and a sharp right hook. Matias steps back to spring a roundhouse kick that’s deftly avoided, and he has to move quickly to regain his balance, because his opponent is ducking in for a one-two punch and a forty-five kick.

The cadet – _the_ cadet, Shiro recognizes him easily, although he hadn’t expected to find him so soon, and here of all places – lands one of the punches, though his kick hits Matias on the elbow instead of the torso, as Matias brings his arm down to guard. It doesn’t deter the cadet in the slightest. He follows through, shifting his weight and bringing his other leg up for a backwards kick. This time it catches Matias on the ribs, sends him staggering to the side so he can stay upright.

Several onlookers hoot their approval. One of the senior officers near Shiro gives a low whistle of admiration. Even Shiro has to admit he’s impressed. Untrained as they are, cadets shouldn’t be giving junior officers such a run for their money.

This one’s got Matias absolutely cornered.

So Shiro stays back, and watches the fight.

There’s something almost – graceful about the way the cadet moves, scrappy and unrefined though he is. Instead of the more structured, grounded way with which cadets are normally taught to fight in their combat training classes, this one makes the most of his slender frame and breathtaking agility. Shiro watches him feint, dodge, move quicksilver, and to an outsider it might look inefficient and sloppy but the longer Shiro watches, the more he realizes no movement is wasted. The cadet lacks the mass for outright power, but he more than makes up for it with momentum and some very smart moves.

He ducks under Matias’ outswinging arm, drops down, and sweeps a leg out while Matias is still trying to shift his footing. His opponent goes down to the mat with a _whoof_ of an exhale, and immediately, the cadet rolls on top of him, one knee on the junior officer’s chest and a fist pressed just under Matias’ collarbone.

“Yield,” Matias concedes, out of breath, hands up by his head in surrender. The small crowd around them breaks into whistles and cheers, with some lighthearted jabs at Matias for losing. Shiro watches as the cadet quietly rises off his opponent and nods, then steps back, looking to the side like he’s unsure of what to do next.

Shiro weighs his options, and decides to go big or go home.

“Either that cadet’s a hell of a fighter or you’re getting slow, Mati,” he quips, stepping closer to the mats. His fellow junior officer laughs, flipping Shiro off, as the cadet turns to see who’s speaking. Shiro sees the moment the cadet recognizes him – his expression goes from wary to something downright inscrutable, guarded, all shuttered eyes and the pinch of his mouth. Shiro smiles and holds up his hands in the universal gesture of surrender and good will. It doesn’t mollify the boy in the slightest.

“Take him on yourself, Shirogane,” Matias calls as he stands up, dusting himself off and rolling one shoulder. “Kid could knock you down a peg or two.”

The cadet tenses, the slightest squaring of shoulders and tightening of expression. Shiro considers the situation.

He probably shouldn’t. He’s still just a junior officer, but he’s definitely more senior than a cadet, especially if this one’s a fresh recruit. He still holds the information of the cadet sneaking out as a threat.

Shiro shrugs out of his jacket, leaving him in just a black tank top and sweatpants.

“I’m game if you are,” he says easily, toeing out of his shoes so he can step to the mat.

He expects the cadet to say no. Shiro wouldn’t fault him if he did.

Instead, when Shiro meets his gaze, he gets that inscrutable look again. The cadet stares at him slantwise for a long moment, before crossing to the other side of the mat.

“Why not?” he asks, the first words Shiro’s heard him speak. His voice is lighter than Shiro had expected, steel under paper. The cadet falls into a defensive stance, hands loosely curled into fists in front of him.

Shiro smirks.

Definitely one of his better Friday nights.

 

Between the two of them, Shiro’s had significantly more formal hand-to-hand and combat training. He has a larger frame and more physical strength. He’s got more discipline and technique.

But this sparring match is making him painfully aware that he’s never been in a real fight.

For the third time, Shiro gets a hand on the cadet and tries to push him down, pin him to the mats. And for the third time, the cadet neatly twists underneath him, this time, hooking his knee around Shiro’s thigh and using the momentum of his fall to topple Shiro with him. Shiro just barely catches himself on his palms, and rolls out of the way to avoid being pinned by a sharp knee to his back.

They’ve been at this nearly fifteen minutes. Shiro’s panting hard, more winded than he’d ever admit, and absolutely delighted. It had been one thing to _watch_ the cadet, but having to contend with that unorthodox and nimble way of fighting, well.

Shiro hasn’t had this much fun in quite a while.

(He’s realized what the other boy’s movements bring to mind – it’s like a scrap in a back alley, all bared teeth, no pulling of punches. Like he’s had to learn to fight out of necessity. Like he’s picked fights his whole life.)

Across the mat, the cadet stays in his defensive crouch, one arm raised to guard. He eyes Shiro warily.

“Draw?” Shiro offers, when he finally manages to speak.

He gets that _look_ again, slantwise and shuttered, although this time there’s an edge to it. It makes Shiro feel like he’s being assessed, scrutinized.

After a long moment that makes Shiro almost want to hold his breath, the cadet nods.

“What – no way! Kick his ass, cadet!” Matias yells, and quite a few people hoot in agreement. Shiro returns the middle finger gesture, grinning at his friend over his shoulder and making people laugh. He gets up, running a hand through his hair and holding out a hand.

The cadet squints at his outstretched arm suspiciously, then stands under his own power. He’s still in defensive stance, shoulders hunched forward, like he’s about to bolt. His gaze is mistrustful, expectant.

Before Shiro can ask what he wants, or what he’s looking for, the cadet turns away and makes his way past the crowd to where Shiro presumes his things are. And while Shiro can hear Matias and a few others start ribbing him for not winning against a fresh cadet, all Shiro can comprehend is the sudden, jarring urge to follow the cadet, not let him out of Shiro’s sight.

Something tugs in his chest, visceral and unignorable. Shiro mutters a hasty _sorry, gotta go for a bit_ and darts through the crowd, following dark hair and rigid posture out the gym.

He doesn’t hesitate before calling out. “Hey!”

The cadet startles, head jerking around. When he recognizes Shiro, he gets that same deer-in-  
headlights look and bolts around the corner. Shiro’s running after him almost before he can think.

“Wait!” He skids around the corridor full-tilt, hand flashing out to grab the cadet once he’s in reach. The kid’s other arm comes up, jamming an elbow down on Shiro’s grip, and training is all that prompts Shiro not to let go.

“Easy, easy,” he says, the same as he might do for a skittish stray cat. He gentles his grip and holds up his other hand. “Look, I’m not here to sell you out.”

The cadet shoots him a disbelieving glare, but at least he stops struggling. His gaze flicks over Shiro as if trying to suss him out. This close, Shiro catches the full weight of intense, violet-grey eyes, and feels a little stunned.

“I wouldn’t,” he adds placatingly, tearing his eyes away to look just a little over the cadet’s shoulder.

It earns him another mistrustful look. “Yeah, right.”

Slightly wounded, Shiro huffs an exhale and releases the cadet completely. He goes for a smile that he hopes is reassuring. “I wouldn’t,” he says again, more firmly this time. “I just, ah.”

One eyebrow goes up. Shiro feels oddly flustered.

“I just – your name, I—” Shiro clears his throat and tries again. “I never got your name.”

Something shifts in the cadet’s expression, but it’s less skeptical now and more scrutinizing. There’s a twist to his mouth that might be irritation and might be amusement. Shiro tucks his hands into his pants pockets and tries to temper his expectations.

The cadet looks to the side, then back at Shiro.

“Keith,” he says carefully, “It’s Keith.”

Shiro feels embarrassingly relieved. He sticks out a hand. “I’m Shiro.”

Keith doesn’t move to take it. “I know.”

That – Shiro suppresses a wince. He tucks his hand back into his pants pockets and smiles, casting about for something to say. There’s a tiny bruise starting to bloom on the high ridge of Keith’s cheek.

“Where’d you learn to fight like that?” Shiro asks. His fingers flex, fighting the strangest urge to run a thumb over the purpling mark and see if it won’t smudge away.

Keith’s eyes cut away. One corner of his mouth curls. “Around.”

Shiro waits a beat. Keith doesn’t offer anything further. Shiro’s aware he’s still barefoot, in just a tank top and sweatpants, standing in a corridor with nothing else to say.

Then Keith shifts away, and there’s the faintest smile tugging at his lips.

“See you, Shiro,” he says, and then he’s gone.

 

Shiro returns to the rec gym, bemused and trying not to think about the way his name had sounded in Keith’s voice.

 

He doesn’t see or hear much of Keith over the next few days and weeks, although he’s not trying too hard either. In fact, the next time they meet is quite by accident.

Shiro walks into Major Hernandez’ physics lecture to find Keith seated in the back row. He’s looking out the window, chin propped up in one hand and pen tapping lazily in the other. Shiro stops for a moment, readings in hand, a little thrown.

Then Hernandez walks in after him, and Shiro has to tear his attention away.

He’s nothing if not professional as he assists the class, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t pick his moments to look.

Keith is unassuming outside of physical training, quiet and withdrawn. Still, it’s easy enough to pick up on the way he moves, the same almost-grace applied whether he’s throwing a punch or reaching out for a paper. When Shiro collects the short quiz at the end of class, he chances a quick glance at Keith’s sheet and is surprised to see small, concise handwriting and answers neatly boxed at the end of each question.

(They’re all correct, too.)

He looks up to take the next sheet and finds Keith already exiting the room.

 

Still, it’s not the last time they meet. Shiro TAs a few more of Keith’s classes. They cross paths in the cafeteria. Keith passes him by in the corridor. Small moments of awareness.

Shiro would never admit to anything, even if pressed, but the only word he has for how he feels is _intrigued._

It’s not often a cadet gets the better of him and then just walks away.

 

Matt finds him in the rec gym one afternoon. There’s a cadet class doing combat training on the sparring mats, so Shiro’s taken one of the treadmills. He’s just stopped to drink and rest, eyeing the ongoing class with interest, when his friend saunters over to him with hands tucked into his jacket pockets and wide, curious eyes.

“That’s an interesting one,” he muses, setting a knee on the bench beside Shiro. On the mats, Keith has his one-two hit parried but lands a tap to his opponent’s solar plexus, then knocks their legs out from underneath them. The instructor calls a stop to the fight. The other cadets break out in murmurs, while Keith just rolls his shoulders and steps away.

It’s an easy win. Shiro had expected as much. A corner of his mouth curls up, tiny burst of pride in his chest.

He glances up to find Matt giving him an inquisitive look out of the corner of his eye, and Shiro realizes he’s been staring. He quickly fixes his eyes on the two cadets squaring off on the mat for the next sparring match, and hopes nothing gives him away.

Matt isn’t fooled one whit.

“Huh, is that your new type?” He gives Shiro a sideways glance and a smirk. “Brooding, skinny, sixty percent leg? Wouldn’t have pegged you to go for that.”

“Shut up,” Shiro says, but there’s no real heat. He allows himself a quick glance at Keith, standing to the side in the Garrison PT uniform of a black tank and sweats, one long line of understated skill. Shiro knows for himself now that Keith doesn’t pull his punches, even in informal sparring matches. It hasn’t stopped delighting him yet.

“What?” Matt blinks down at him, like butter wouldn’t melt. Shiro’s known him too long to believe that expression. “I’m perfectly at liberty to tease you about your new crush. Or what if he turns out to be your _soulmate_ —”

“Yeah, no.” Shiro turns his head a bit to raise an eyebrow at Matt. “I barely know a thing about him.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t get to know him more,” Matt points out, unfazed. He jabs Shiro on the shoulder, making him flinch. “And don’t tell me you _still_ don’t believe in the whole soulmates thing. You’re horribly unromantic.”

Shiro makes to elbow Matt in the ribs in retaliation, but he’s easily dodged. So he settles for rolling his eyes and turning his attention back to watching the cadets sparring. “It doesn’t work that way,” he says, and he knows Matt will recognize the line being drawn. Mercifully, his friend backs off with a huff.

It isn’t that Shiro doesn’t _believe_ in soulmates, after all. He knows his parents had been, when they’d been alive. Sam and Colleen, Matt’s parents, are as well, and their relationship is as solid as any Shiro’s ever seen. And it's very pretty, the idea of finding someone and falling in love with them and feeling the red string form around your finger. But the idea that the universe decides something so absolute and significant in so arbitrary a fashion – taking a whole other person and telling you, _this is who you’ll be tied to for the rest of your life_ – it’s never sat well with him.

Love is an effort, is a hundred different ways in which you make a relationship because you want the other person in your life. It’s not something that Fate can play with, deciding on chance which love is made irrevocable.

(Matt’s always telling him that he’ll change his mind when he finally meets the person on the end of his red string, if and when he finds them and falls in love. Shiro’s answer is always to say he’ll figure that out for himself if he gets there.)

He gets up and collects his stuff, intent on a post-gym shower before dinner. Matt gives him one more pointed look, then shrugs and leaves for whatever he’d come here for.

It’s tempting, but Shiro doesn’t look back as he leaves.

 

.o0o.

 

Next week, Keith’s class gets their first chance at the flight simulators.

Shiro’s got a lecture on mechanics of deformable bodies that morning, so he isn’t aware of why the junior officers’ lounge is buzzing when he turns up for a late lunch. Matt slides into the seat across him just as Shiro unwraps his burrito and starts to eat one-handed, other hand busy flipping through his ethics class notes.

“Cadet flight class today,” Matt says, twirling his fork idly through his pasta.

“Hm?” Shiro makes a distracted, questioning noise around a mouthful of burrito. He finally finds the pages he’s looking for.

“He’s pretty good, your boy.” Lips pinched over a smile, Matt reaches out and plucks Shiro’s can of Coke from by his elbow. He gets a sip in before Shiro can swipe it back, then the words finally get through to Shiro.

“He’s _not_ my—” and Shiro realizes his slip, mouth snapping shut but damage already done. Matt raises his eyebrows and looks away, innocent as you please, but Shiro knows he’s been caught. He grimaces as he sets his Coke back down and returns to his food.

“Unorthodox,” Matt goes on, as if the interruption hadn’t happened, as if Shiro doesn’t maybe want to sink into the floor. “He goes by the book enough, I suppose, but he’s definitely not _standard_ and he’s pretty innovative. Inspired, even, if I were being generous.”

“What’s that mean?” Shiro asks, taking the bait. It’s not like his friend will shut up, anyway.

Matt takes his time with the next mouthful of pasta, in a way especially done to tick Shiro off. It works; it usually does. Shiro does not actually possess the infinite reserves of patience that people often ascribe to him.

“He’s got damn good instincts,” Matt finally says, pushing some mushrooms around his takeaway box. “But he’s more interested in result than procedure. He cut out three of the obstacles by nosediving instead of weaving.”

“Really?” Shiro blinks, surprised but impressed. That wouldn’t have been an easy maneuver to pull off.

Matt rolls his eyes and flicks some garlic at him. “You’re not supposed to be proud of that.”

Shiro retaliates by stealing some of the bland chicken that Matt's set aside. “Good pilots are always something to be interested in,” he points out, but it’s a weak defense. It gets him another pointed look and a long-suffering sigh. But Matt makes no further comment, settling down to eat in earnest and leaving Shiro to his burrito and his notes.

It’s got Shiro’s curiosity piqued, though, despite his best intentions not to respond exactly as Matt anticipates. Few enough pilots would earn that commendation from his friend; for a _cadet_ to get Matt to call them _inspired,_ well.

Matt catches his eye over their lunches and smirks. Shiro chucks a half-bitten piece of lettuce at him, making Matt squawk in indignation and disgust. The interaction devolves from there, until the end of lunch break forces them to pack up and book it to their next classes. Shiro has physics in aeronautics up next, and his path takes him past the flight simulation room used by cadets. It brings back to mind his conversation with Matt.

He shakes his head, continuing down the corridor.

(Still, he thinks, it might be worth his while to check sometime, even just once.)

 

The second time, Shiro’s off Garrison grounds on a survival training trip. He gets back with a sunburned nose and sand in places it’s got no business being. The shower water runs red and gritty as he rinses off, trying to get clean for the first time in four days.

All he wants to do after is eat three burgers and then crawl into bed, but Captain Montgomery needs him to log the details from the day’s classes and the cafeteria only has leftovers by this time, anyway. He settles for ‘deconstructed sloppy joes’ – really just a couple of hunks of bread and some microwaved chili – and tucks himself into a corner of the nearly-empty junior officers’ lounge. The quicker he gets things over with, the sooner he can sleep.

Montgomery had been in charge of the day’s lecture on environmental conditions in space, and the flight class. Shiro taps through the different simulator runs, most only a few seconds to a few minutes long, filing the times and scores to the class record so the instructor can reference them later.

He pauses when he catches one that’s capped at seven minutes and seventeen seconds.

_K.Kogane, FPP74-2112._

(He shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t.)

Shiro opens the file.

He watches the full simulated flight, earphones in, chili forgotten. Then he replays it once, twice. He pauses the video log.

 _Inspired,_ Matt had said, and as Shiro hits play to watch in first-person POV as the single-pilot cruiser jet swerves and tilts on its axis to bypass four obstacles instead of weaving around them, he understands.

Keith lacks finesse, and his landing is shit, and there are too many close calls and _almosts_ than his chosen methods of maneuvering can justify. He’s two minutes over the maximum allowed time for this particular basic flight exercise. But even Shiro recognizes the potential in the way the pilot handles the controls.

Keith’s a damn good flyer.

Shiro logs in his time and his score – riddled with deductions and a time penalty, but still the highest in class – and moves onto the next student’s record, but his thoughts linger. The way the jet had cut to the side and banked hard, turning a near-90 to sweep past the ridges of rock in the way—

Shiro exhales a tiny smile.

This boy is going to be trouble.

 

The fifth time, Shiro finally gets to watch.

He tells himself that it’s a general interest in the new cadet class of the fighter pilot program that has him standing in the viewing galleys, hands in his pockets as he leans against the wall. The motley assortment of cadets stands outside the simulator, murmuring amongst themselves as they watch Keith finish his basic solo flight course, so far the only cadet in the room to make it through to the end.

(Granted, he’d nearly crashed twice, and his landing still sucks, and Shiro’s sure that Montgomery is about to pop a blood vessel. But he finishes the whole course, with only a one-minute penalty.)

It’s the first time Shiro gets to see Keith fly in real time, and he sees now what Matt had meant by _not standard_ and _innovative._ The beginner flight courses are meant to instruct cadets in basic flight maneuvers, to show them the fundamentals of air and spacecraft control and lay the groundwork for more advanced techniques. There are standardized maneuvers, flight patterns, and protocols that all beginning pilots learn, to get them used to flying.

While Keith can clearly handle a flightcraft, he’s anything _but_ standard.

It makes Shiro wonder where he’d learned to pilot like that.

He watches Keith step out of the simulator, nod at his instructor. When Montgomery starts discussing his performance – and Shiro bites down on a smile at the criticism of the landing – Keith nods again, turns to walk to the back of the room. He moves with that same almost-grace. He’s got his head held up in a way Shiro knows people like to interpret as arrogance, but on Keith it’s just a reflection of the way he takes things head-on.

 _There goes your boy,_ Matt’s voice says in Shiro’s head, with a sly smile.

Shiro tears his eyes away to watch the next cadet in the simulation, but Keith’s always a steady presence at the back of his mind, at the edge of his line of sight.

It occurs to him that he should be concerned by the way he’s so drawn to Keith, but then again, Keith seems to magnetize everything in a room when he walks in. Shiro doesn’t think he can be faulted for getting caught up in the pull.

The instructor calls for the class to settle down, but the murmuring persists, cadets turning their heads to glance at Keith not-so-surreptitiously. None of them talk _to_ him, though, and Keith pays them no attention either. He keeps his eyes fixed on the screen showing his classmate’s progress in the flight simulator. Whoever’s in there, they’re not doing even half as well as Keith had, crashing just two minutes into the exercise. Montgomery gets started as soon as they step out, pointing out their errors in flight control and how badly they’d estimated the turning radius on one curve. The cadet looks understandably chagrined, although Montgomery does point out their steady take-off. Corrections and commendations in balance; the man has always been a good instructor.

Shiro watches the next cadet take their turn, then the next, then the next. He leaves when the class is halfway over. As he walks to his own lecture, he muses over everything he’d seen in the almost-hour he’d stayed in the sim room.

Trouble indeed.

 

.o0o.

 

It’s almost three months after their sparring match that Shiro gets to talk to Keith again.

His class on mechanical diagnostics had let out early due to a mechanical malfunction (and they had all appreciated the irony even as all of them escaped the lab in relief), so he’s picking up lunch before swinging by Lieutenant Ryu’s office to pick up a fresh stack of papers to be graded. A couple of other junior officers stop him to chat – Aya, in particular, drags him into a brief discussion of their upcoming flight simulation assignment – so Shiro gets to the cafeteria at the beginning of the lunch rush.

He spots a by-now familiar head getting in line, and jogs over before he can think twice.

“Keith!”

The cadet turns around, brow furrowed; his frown only deepens when he recognizes who’s calling to him. Still, he doesn’t move away, holding his place in line as Shiro comes up to him, a little winded from trotting across the room.

“Hey,” Shiro says, taking his place in line behind Keith. “On break?”

Keith squints at him a moment longer before shrugging. “Yeah.” He tips his head at all the other cadets milling around. “We’re in between classes.”

“Ah.” Shiro nods. And then, “wanna eat with me?”

It earns him a perplexed blink. “Lunch?”

“Well, yeah.” Shiro nudges Keith forward in line, peering over his head at the food displays. He hopes they don’t run out of the ham and cheese sandwiches before he gets one. “Unless you’re having lunch with someone else?”

“...no.” Keith’s still looking at him in bemusement, but he shrugs again, turning to the lunch displays. “I don’t mind.”

“Good.” Shiro smiles at him, hopefully reassuringly, before he turns his attention to the servers behind the food counters. They get their food – sandwiches and juice for Shiro, bacon rice for Keith – and snag seats at table on the far side of the cafeteria, away from most of the crowd beginning to gather. Normally Shiro would eat in the junior officers’ lounge, but he makes an exception today.

Shiro’s in the middle of unwrapping his sandwich when Keith looks up from poking at his food. “Did you need something from me?”

Shiro pauses, plastic half-off his food. “What makes you think that?”

One unamused eyebrow goes up. “I can’t think of any other reason you’d be having lunch with me.”

Something about the way he says it rubs Shiro the wrong way, but he sets it aside for the moment. “Maybe I just want to get to know you?” he points out as he tears his sandwich in half.

This time, both eyebrows go up. “Really.”

“Yeah?” Shiro’s mouth curls, a little teasingly. “With flying skills like yours, I don’t think most people would blame me.”

That… seems to catch Keith off-guard, because he actually sets his spoon down, eyes going wide. He looks a little – uncertain.

Shiro takes the gamble.

“I mean,” he goes on, casually, cracking open his bottle of juice, “your landing is _shit_ and your brand of efficiency is terrible and reckless, but for a cadet, you’re damn good. You’ve got a lot of potential.”

He chances a glance at Keith as he takes a bite of his sandwich. The cadet is staring at him, eyes narrowed faintly, again with the look that says he’s trying to suss Shiro out. Shiro keeps his expression mild as he eats.

(He can be patient if he wants.)

Eventually, Keith glances down at his own food and takes a big spoonful. Swallows. “You think my landing is shit?”

It’s Shiro’s turn to be caught off-guard, but the look on Keith’s face is a provocation. There’s the tiniest curl at the corner of his mouth, and Shiro realizes the little shit is being _smug._

It almost makes him laugh. “Yeah, it is. You know it is.”

At that, Keith exhales a small smile and shrugs in resignation. “It’s hard to estimate,” he admits, “and cruisers and stuff are really unwieldy. Really… big.” He wrinkles his nose.

Shiro huffs his own small chuckle in sympathy. “It takes a lot of getting used to.” He has enough painful memories of crashed flight simulations to know.

“Mm.” Keith eats a few more bites, demolishing half his plate in one go. His eyes cut to Shiro over the top of his can of soda. “Can you teach me?”

Shiro pauses, halfway to a bite of sandwich. “Sorry?”

“How to land.” Keith sets his can down and looks at Shiro head-on. It’s disconcerting how cutting his gaze can be. “Can you teach me.”

Carefully, Shiro sets down his food. This time it’s his turn to look Keith over, searching. But behind the veneer of challenge, Keith’s expression is earnest and maybe even… hopeful.

It dislodges something inside Shiro, just a little.

(Later, he’ll blame it on the sharp clarity of Keith’s eyes, caged and candid all at once.)

“Sure,” he says, as warmly and sincerely as he can muster. “I can’t promise anything regular, though, or that I’ll be the best teacher. But if you wanna learn, I’ll show you what I know.”

Keith’s face breaks into the first genuine smile that Shiro’s seen. It knocks him sidewise for a moment.

“I’ll take it,” Keith says, and goes back to eating. They finish their respective lunches in comfortable silence. Keith gets up first, with a small wave as he goes.

Shiro tries not to watch him leave.

 

.o0o.

 

Perhaps that’s where it starts, with Shiro meeting with Keith after class hours in the smaller flight sim rooms, trying to teach him how to take off and land steadily, how to get used to maneuvering in cruiser and fighter jets. With Shiro walking into another class that he has to help with, and looking up to find Keith again in the far corner, and getting a little smile. With Shiro coming across Keith in the corridors and greeting him, casual and easy as any other friend, and Keith hesitating less and less to say hello in return.

(Perhaps it starts when Shiro catches a cadet in a back alley where he shouldn’t be, but neither of them quite realize what _it_ is and what’s starting just yet.)

Little by little by little, like a stray cat, Keith warms up to Shiro. Maybe it’s the flight lessons, maybe it’s the lunches together; maybe it’s the way Shiro easily treats Keith just like he treats everyone else. Whatever it is, it’s enough for Shiro to know that every smile Keith gives him is hard-won and well-earned.

He taps Keith on the wrist to let the other boy know he’s restarting the simulation. It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and they’ve got lucky with the sim rooms – normally they’re booked up with junior officers logging in required flight practice, or senior officers racking up hours ahead of missions. Keith’s landings are still wobbly, but he’s improved enough to show less deductions in his training scores.

“One last run,” Shiro says, giving Keith a pointed look when the other boy frowns at him. “You’re still changing the angles of your wings too early. Stop anticipating the landing too much. Patience yields focus.”

“How the hell do you even anticipate something too much,” Keith mutters, but he obediently returns the controls to neutral as Shiro restarts the basic flight route. His takeoff is clean, his flight path steady; Shiro’s deliberately been choosing routes with no obstacles, figuring the nosediving and other reckless maneuvers can be addressed some other day. Keith follows the straightforward path with ease, maintaining proper altitude and speed. And he tries, he does, Shiro can see it, but he still eases the wings up a little too early and it throws his descent angle off. The cruiser jet skitters over the runway as it touches down, making Shiro wince.

“Damnit.” Keith swears under his breath, making a face, but Shiro just laughs. He resets the simulator and logs the flight hours under his name, checking them off.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says a little distractedly, shutting down the sim. The hatch pops open behind them. “For a cadet, you’re already doing really well. No one expects you guys to know these things right off the bat. You’re here to learn, after all.”

He turns to exit the sim, and is met by Keith’s skeptical expression. But when Shiro raises his eyebrows questioningly, Keith just shrugs and walks out into the main room. Shiro follows, feeling a little off-put.

“Anyway,” he goes on, closing the sim hatch. “I was wondering if you wanted to go out with me for dinner.”

Keith slows to a halt, frown back on his face.

Shiro looks at him oddly over his shoulder, until he realizes how someone might interpret what he’d said.

“I mean,” he amends, sheepishly running a hand over his undercut. “You’ve been doing really well over the last few weeks, and the food here is shit, so we should go out and get something. To eat. You deserve it.”

Keith’s expression has turned uncertain again, and something occurs to Shiro.

He pauses for a moment, considering his words carefully, before deciding to just go for it.

“Have you never been off the Garrison grounds _legally?”_

He gets a full-blown glower in return, but the color’s starting to creep into Keith’s face. Shiro smothers a grin. _Busted._

“It’s not like I’m allowed to keep a vehicle,” Keith points out defensively, shoulders hunching up. He’s starting to resemble a cornered cat.

Shiro cocks an eyebrow. “You got into town _somehow,_ though.”

Keith’s mouth snaps shut and he looks away. His cheeks are flushed red. It’s terribly endearing, and it makes Shiro relent. He doesn’t want to push Keith away, after all.

“Come on.” He claps Keith on the shoulder and nods back towards the doors of the sim room. “We can take my bike. I know a place in town that has good burgers.”

It’s a long few moments before the tension eases from Keith’s body, although he keeps flicking wary glances at Shiro. But eventually he nods.

“Good.” Shiro smiles, trying to be reassuring, giving Keith’s shoulder one last squeeze before withdrawing his hand. “Get changed and meet me in the main lobby of your dorm. We’ll get you checked out, then we can go.”

 

If Shiro is honest, part of him does wonder if Keith will show up. He wouldn’t be surprised if the cadet bails, and Shiro wouldn’t fault him either. Still, he fiddles with the cuffs of his leather jacket, trying not to watch the entrances to the lobby and smiling at the cadets who recognize him.

He waits five minutes, ten, fifteen. He’s just decided to give it half an hour before he goes when Keith shuffles in.

He’s dressed in the same outfit that Shiro remembers – dark jeans, dark grey top, red jacket. Red boots, too, and fingerless gloves. Shiro flexes his own hands in their gloves with a tiny smile.

“Ready to go?” he asks, once Keith’s within earshot.

Keith gives him another wary look before shrugging. “If you are.”

The reticence holds, even as they head over to the dorm officer’s desk; it sits in the tightness of Keith’s shoulders and the furrow of his brow. Shiro gets Keith signed out quickly; if the cadet has any comments on how easy it is, he doesn’t say anything. Still, there’s something close to amusement tucked in the corner of Keith’s mouth as Shiro walks them out of the lobby and towards the junior officers’ dorm.

(He tries to ignore the looks they’re getting from the other cadets. He succeeds, mostly.)

“Do you do this a lot?” Keith finally breaks the silence between them as they approach the garage. Shiro’s beginning to wonder if _skeptical_ is Keith’s default expression.

“Do what?” Shiro asks, slowing down and taking out his vehicle pass.

Keith comes to a stop just inside the garage, looking at Shiro in utter perplexity. “This,” and he gestures between the two of them, then to the room around them.

Shiro looks at him a moment longer, eyebrows raised, but Keith doesn’t elaborate. So he shrugs, and smiles good-naturedly.

“If you mean leave the Garrison, then yeah, sometimes.” A corner of his mouth stays quirked up. “But if you mean bring someone with me, then no, not really.”

Keith’s frown deepens. “Then _why?_ ”

There’s something in there, something to unpack in the two words and the way Keith says them, the way he’s looking at Shiro like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. And Shiro would be willing to sit down with that baggage and go through it, he really would, but he also knows: not now, not yet.

So he softens his smile and says, sincerely, “because I want to.”

( _Because you deserve it._ )

Keith looks at him a moment longer, but Shiro’s answer seems to be enough, because the line of his shoulders eases. He looks less like a rabbit waiting to bolt, and this time, when Shiro leads him into the garage, he follows willingly.

They find his red hoverbike easily, parked among a dozen other similar transport crafts owned by his fellow officers. Shiro catches the way Keith looks at it: sharp and assessing, running his eyes from the controls to the engines to the tail. His fingers twitch just slightly as Shiro walks around to unlock it.

 _He knows how to fly this,_ Shiro realizes, and he has to tamp down on a smirk. One more thing to figure out another day.

“Here,” he says instead, unhooking one of the spare helmets that the junior officers keep hanging on the wall by the bike parking. He tosses it over to Keith, then takes his own helmet from the handlebar of his bike. He waits until Keith’s got it strapped on before wearing his own and getting on the bike.

There’s the slightest hesitation, then Keith gets on behind him.

Shiro goes through a basic systems rundown as lithe arms wind around his waist, tentative and uncertain. He huffs out a quiet laugh, reaching down to tap Keith on the wrist. He feels Keith startle, but the grip turns more sure, until Keith is a warm line down his back, helmet digging into Shiro’s spine.

“You all right?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder.

The helmet nudges his body as Keith nods.

Shiro eases the bike out of the parking space and to the entrance of the garage. He taps his pass on the scanner by the wall, logging himself out for the night. One last glance back at Keith, who tightens his hold.

Then they’re off.

 

Dinner is a pleasant if mostly quiet affair. Shiro leaves Keith to his food, trying not to be too amused by how fast the cadet wolfs down a large cheeseburger before proceeding to eat most of their ‘shared’ fries. The town of Pieira is crowded on Friday nights, full of locals about town and officers taking a night out. Shiro’s greeted by several familiar faces, smiling and waving easily.

No one pays attention to Keith.

It sits a little off with Shiro, but the cadet doesn’t seem to mind. He’s still guarded when Shiro asks questions, still seems to hold Shiro at arm’s length, but at the end of the night when they’re getting back on the bike – Keith still needs to be back by roll call, after all – Keith hesitates just before getting on.

“I—” He bites down on his lip, fumbling with the helmet. He’s looking down at the sidewalk, and silhouetted as he is against the light, Shiro can’t see his expression. But he hears the sincerity in Keith’s voice when he looks back up, can just make out a small smile. “Thanks, Shiro.”

It catches Shiro just a little off-guard, but mostly he feels warm.

“Anytime, Keith.”

 

.o0o.

 

They fall together, then, finding spaces in each other’s lives. Shiro makes the time to coach Keith on the simulators; Keith slowly, but steadily, improves. Keith finds Shiro at the library and they share a table together, with Shiro working on the papers he’s grading and Keith picking his way through trigonometry problem sets. Shiro comes across Keith in the cafeteria and it becomes natural to get a table, eating in companionable silence broken by short, casual conversations.

Once, Shiro enters the gym to find Keith’s class in the middle of another physical training session. He takes his time setting his things down on a bench, watching as Keith easily deflects his classmate’s two-hit combo and take her down to the mat with an ankle hooked behind her knee. Then Keith looks up, and catches his eye, and there’s the faintest smirk, an uptick of the corner of his mouth.

Shiro shakes his head, huffs a laugh.

Then Keith turns away, goes to stand off to the side, and Matt’s voice is in Shiro’s head again. _There goes your boy._

It makes Shiro wonder at how easily Keith’s managed to insert himself in Shiro’s life.

They go out to Pieira to eat, sometimes. When Keith manages a clean landing for the first time, bright eyes and fierce grin as he eases the cruiser jet into the hangar. When Shiro aces his combat flight practical. When Keith offhandedly mentions he’s never had Japanese food before.

This time, it’s because they’ve both got a rare Saturday afternoon free.

They’re halfway to town when Shiro makes an impromptu decision. It’s not too late in the day; the sun won’t set for a while yet. He slows the bike down and eases them off the highway, turning out into the red, red desert that stretches for miles all around the Garrison.

Keith’s arms tighten around his waist in alarm.

“Shiro?” His voice is barely audible over the sounds of traffic and the wind whistling past them, but Shiro still hears the apprehension. He smiles and keeps going, taking them in the direction of the hills just before the canyon break, where they’ll be away from prying eyes.

“Shiro, what—”

The sudden acceleration cuts Keith off, and he presses himself tightly against Shiro, fingers clutching at the leather jacket. Shiro almost feels bad for scaring him, and he eases on the throttles when they’re far out enough. They come to a stop at the foot of a hill, and when Shiro turns, Keith’s glaring at him through the visor.

“What are we doing?” he demands, withdrawing his arms to cross them over his chest.

Shiro leaves the engine idling as he slides off the bike. He takes the helmet off, running a hand through his hair as he inhales the crisp desert air.

“You can fly this, right?” he asks, leveling Keith with a look that dares him to say no.

For a moment, he thinks Keith just might and for a moment, Shiro would let him. Plausible deniability would remain in his favor, and Keith could keep his secrets. But Keith isn’t the only one between them who can challenge; Shiro likes to think he’s earned Keith’s honesty at this point.

So he keeps looking at Keith until Keith turns away. The cadet reaches out to run his fingers lightly over the hoverbike display, closing his hand over one of the handlebars.

“Yeah,” and he might hide the tell but Shiro can still hear the smirk in his tone, the pride. Keith looks at him in matching provocation and something sparks across Shiro’s skin. “Yeah, I can.”

He grins. “Show me.”

So Keith does.

He slides forward on the bike so Shiro can get on behind him, can wrap his arms around a trim waist and resist the urge to hook his chin over Keith’s shoulder. Keith runs through the systems check with ease, making the filter and engine adjustments for flying over desert sand instead of concrete. Shiro raises his eyebrows when Keith opts out of the speed cap.

Before he can ask, though, Keith’s hands flex over the handlebars and he’s beaming at Shiro over his shoulder. “Ready?” he asks, a little cheekily.

Shiro snorts. “As I’ll ever be.”

Keith just laughs and guns it.

They head out over the desert, and Shiro’s intuition was right – Keith _does_ know how to fly a hoverbike, and _well._ He keeps them at a steady altitude, skirting the hills, flying easily over the rock and sand. When they’re far out enough that the sounds of traffic have fallen far away, Keith tilts the bike and weaves them through the hills. He accelerates to take them up over a crest, and then—

“Keith—”

—keeps going.

“Keith _._ ”

Shiro’s arms tighten around Keith’s waist, both in warning and in foreboding. They clear the top of the hill and speed out full-tilt for the lip of the canyon. Shiro knows, explicitly, that beyond that is a half-mile drop.

“ _Keith._ ”

Keith throws the throttles open to full and whoops as he launches them over the edge of a cliff.

There is one frightening, heart-stopping moment when they are poised in midair and Shiro is sure that this is how he dies. Then the bike plummets and the ledge underneath seems to rocket up to meet them. The blowback from the engines causes them to rebound slightly, and Keith banks right, _hard,_ riding their momentum and letting the action-reaction drag of the hover force on the canyon wall slow them to a more reasonable speed. He follows the ledge as it hugs the outcropping, easing on the acceleration as Shiro tries to ease his heartbeat.

“What the _fuck,_ ” he says, when he’s caught his breath, when he stops feeling like his heart’s going to jump into his throat.

Keith laughs again.

Well, at least Shiro now knows why Keith’s so good at flying.

 

They trade off back at the foot of one of the hills. Shiro stumbles off first, pulling off his helmet and taking deep, calming breaths. Keith gets off with much more poise, tugging off his own helmet. He shakes his hair out, turning it into a riot of curls around his face and somehow looking windswept. It startles a laugh out of Shiro, and he doesn’t stop even when Keith scowls at him.

“Do _not,_ ” Shiro wheezes out, slightly hysterical, pointing a finger at Keith before the cadet can protest. “You pitched us off a cliff.”

“I knew what I was doing,” Keith points out casually, leaning against the bike. There’s that smirk hiding in the corners of his mouth again, a smug twinkle in his eye. Shiro doesn’t resist the urge to clamp a hand down on soft, dark hair and mess it up.

“ _Brat,_ ” he scoffs, a little raggedly, over the garbled sounds of Keith’s protests. He’s grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. And Keith – Keith bats his hands away and _laughs._

It’s graceless and entirely uncontrived; Keith’s whole face scrunches up, eyes crinkled and lips curled back over his gums. His cheeks are still pink from adrenaline and delight. The laugh goes all hiccupy and Keith wraps his arms around his middle, trying to calm down.

He’s – arresting. _Beautiful._

Shiro’s breath catches in his throat.

“Well,” Keith says, rubbing the heel of his palm over his eyes. Shiro flicks his gaze away. Keith’s mouth is still pinched around a smile. “You did ask if I could fly it.”

(And it calls to mind Keith at lunch talking about the simulator; _cruisers and stuff are really unwieldy._ Always overcompensating for landings. That reckless brand of piloting. Shiro thinks about the ease with which Keith handles the hoverbike and understands now.

No wonder, if he’d learned to fly like this.)

He snorts, cuffing Keith on the side of the head. “Brat,” he says again, a little more fondly this time. Keith keeps smiling, smug and unrepentant; Shiro rolls his eyes. “Come on. We still need to get dinner.”

He resumes front seat as they drive to town. Keith is a warm line against his back, fingers clutching the front of Shiro’s jacket. Their smiles linger as they bicker about where to eat.

 

It’s another couple of weeks before Shiro finally asks Keith _why_ he can fly like that. Midterms take up their time; Shiro holes up in the junior officers’ lounge, studying with Matt and their other classmates. Keith disappears to god-knows-where, but Shiro’s TA’d enough of his classes to know that the cadet will do all right. So he loses himself in notes and reviewers, in flash cards with Aya and problem sets with Matt. He sits in testing rooms and scratches out answers until his brain feels a lot like mush.

(“You know, _technically,_ given what brain matter _is,_ our brains really _are_ mush—”

“Aya, please. Not helping.”)

After his three-day practical exam in survival training, Shiro returns to the Garrison with the rest of the junior officers a dusty, sunburned, windswept mess. He takes as thorough a shower as his exhausted self can manage, then crawls into his dorm bed to sleep for hopefully a week.

His traitorous body still wakes him up at half past seven the next day, but at least he feels more human. It’s also Saturday, and the start of a three-day break before classes resume.

Shiro debates going back to sleep, or at least burrowing in his covers for the morning, but his stomach growls in a reminder that he hadn’t had dinner last night. With great reluctance, he pries himself from his thin mattress and goes for breakfast.

Surprisingly, he runs into Keith in the corridor outside the cafeteria.

“Hey!” Shiro jogs a bit to catch up with the cadet, then claps him on the shoulder. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Keith turns to him with a full-blown glower, squinting in the artificial lighting, and he looks so irritable that Shiro has to bite down on a laugh.

“Good morning to you, too,” he says, not without humor. Keith grumbles something unintelligible and resumes shuffling forward, but he doesn’t pull away either. Shiro takes it as a good thing.

“How were midterms?” he asks, as they enter the cafeteria. Predictably, it’s much less crowded than usual – most students will be sleeping in, relaxing a little on a rare day off. Keith follows Shiro to the food counters, eyes still blearily scrunched shut.

“How the fuck are you so _awake,_ ” he mutters, almost banging into a metal divider. Shiro purses his lips shut and takes a calming breath.

“Old habits,” he says, carefully steering the younger boy into line. He makes a mental note to get Keith a coffee first thing. Keith turns to peer at him dubiously. Shiro offers him a polite smile.

They get their food, and Shiro gets the privilege of watching Keith wake up in increments as he eats his breakfast. Matt gives him a concerned look when he stops by to say hi to Shiro, but Shiro shoos his friend away before he can start questioning.

By the time they’ve both finished eating, the cadet looks much more alert and aware of his surroundings. Shiro is finishing his cereal innocuously. Keith blinks, looking around like he’s not sure how he’d ended up here.

“Good morning,” Shiro says again, casual as you please, and then finally cracks up when Keith nails him with a chunk of bread.

They clear their plates and head out of the cafeteria together. Keith’s still yawning; Shiro has the inexplicable urge to ruffle his hair, or maybe thumb away the crumbs by Keith’s bottom lip. He tucks his hands into his pockets instead.

“Anything to do today?” he asks, tugging Keith’s arm a bit to steer him through the growing crowd of students and officers.

“Hm?” Keith looks up at him distractedly. His expression turns contemplative. “No, not really.”

Shiro hesitates a moment, then smiles. “Wanna head out? We both have the day off.”

He’s gotten good at picking up the flicker over Keith’s face that says he’s second-guessing the offer, although it comes less and less these days. He hopes that’s a good thing. Keith’s hands go into the pockets of his cadet uniform and he hunches up slightly, looks a bit to the left.

“Okay,” he says, and this time when he looks back at Shiro there’s a soft curl to his mouth.

“Meet you by the garage after lunch?” Shiro needs to get a few things done first – _make himself look good,_ as Matt teases – but it’s a three day break. He has time.

Keith nods, turning to make his way to the cadet dorms. “Okay.”

 

Shiro makes the mistake of dropping by Dr. Holt’s lab to deliver some papers before he heads to the garage. Matt pokes his head out from between the stacks of references he’s labelling for his father, and the _knowing_ look on his friend’s face has Shiro bracing for the worst.

“Heading out?” Matt asks, casual to a fault.

“None of your business,” Shiro mutters, depositing the papers on the other end of the table. He half-considers dumping them on Matt’s head instead.

“Hot date with your soulmate?” Matt’s still blinking at him, all wide eyes, but there’s a twist to his mouth that lets Shiro know his friend is barely restraining a grin. He answers with a pointed look.

“I’m just _saying—_ ” and Matt breaks off with a yelp as Shiro _does_ smack him in the face with one of the references. They devolve into a scuffle as Shiro tries to smother his friend and Matt tries to get Shiro off him, which is how Dr. Holt finds them when he enters his lab with yet another stack of texts. He arches an eyebrow at them, at which they both pull apart with sheepish smiles.

“Thank you, Shiro,” he says, trading the texts in his arms for the papers Shiro’s delivered.

“Anytime, sir,” Shiro answers, smiling and stepping on Matt’s foot at his muttered ‘ _ingratiation’._ Dr. Holt shakes his head as he walks further into the lab. Shiro dodges an elbow from Matt and leaves.

“Have fun, loverboy!” Matt yells after him. Shiro flips him off as he ducks out the door.

The good mood carries Shiro to the garage, where he finds Keith loitering by the entrance and eyeing one of the larger hovercrafts enviously. His expression turns a little guilty when he catches Shiro looking at him, but Shiro just grins as he leads them both inside. He tosses Keith one of the helmets, picks up his own. The motions are familiar to them both now.

Keith and the feel of him against Shiro are familiar now, too, but Shiro doesn’t dwell on that as he revs the engine and takes them out of the Garrison.

 

They’re tucked under an outcropping, taking a break, when Shiro asks.

Keith’s on the ground, leaning against the hoverbike a few feet away from Shiro, legs sprawled gracelessly in front of him. He’s pressing the sports drink bottle to his forehead, never mind that the condensation is trickling all down his face. Shiro glances at him out of the corner of his eye as he takes a swig of his own drink.

“So,” he says, slowly. “Where _did_ you learn to fly like this?”

There’s a long pause, in which Shiro wonders if Keith’s even heard his question, or if he’s just ignoring it. But then Keith lowers the bottle, cradling it between his palms in his lap. His brow furrows slightly as he looks out over the canyon, the red desert, to the horizon beyond. A corner of his mouth twists up, a not-quite-smile.

“I raced,” he answers, eventually. He’s fiddling with the bottle cap, twisting and untwisting. He’s curled in on himself, just a little.

It takes a few moments to click, and then Shiro turns to him in surprise. “On a bike?”

Keith shrugs. It’s not as nonchalant as he probably intends it to be. “Not much else a kid like me could do out here.”

He means it to be self-deprecating; Shiro can tell that much. But he looks Keith and tries to imagine it: a skinny boy at fifteen, sixteen, on a hoverbike that’s been borrowed or stolen or given to him, maybe. This plucky, scrappy kid racing through the canyons, probably showing everyone up, probably _winning._ He’d probably snuck out of his foster homes then, too.

It’s not something Shiro should condone, but he looks at Keith and all he can think about is how desperate Keith must have been to fly, to get out and chase the horizon. All he can think about is how familiar that slow-blooming ache is, because it sits restless under his own skin, too.

Keith’s probably waiting to be told off; he’s still hunched over a bit, still fiddling with the cap. Shiro exhales, long and deliberate, and smiles wryly.

“Explains the jump, huh,” he says, and takes a swig of his drink.

When he glances down, Keith’s expression is a little bit disbelieving and a little bit – something else. It tugs at Shiro, knocks him a little sidewise.

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

“I could show you sometime,” Keith says playfully. “If you think you’re up to it.”

Shiro snorts, laughing as he leans back against the hoverbike. “I’d kick your ass, hotshot.”

Keith’s laughing too, just a little, as he turns to look back out over the desert.

“I’d like to see you try.”

 

They get back a little past dinner, but neither of them seem to mind. Shiro shuts off the hoverbike while Keith hangs up his helmet. They walk out of the garage side by side.

Keith’s expression is soft, the slightest crinkle at the corners of his eyes, as he turns to Shiro and says good night.

 

.o0o.

 

Eight weeks later, Keith takes his first finals in flight class. He clears the whole route, from takeoff to landing, in just under five minutes. His touch-down is neat and tidy as anything.

They celebrate with cheap Thai food and dessert at an old, family-run bakery. Shiro gives Keith the strawberry from his cupcake. Keith rolls his eyes, but his cheeks are pink.

The two-week-long, mid-year break goes by quickly. Shiro spends most of it clearing his duties as a junior officer and logging in flight simulation hours for more complicated space routes.

Then the pre-semester assessment meeting comes, and Montgomery places Keith on the fast track of the fighter pilot program.

Shiro’s a little naive to assume that’s when the resentment starts, but by the time things come to a head, it hardly matters.

 

It’s Aya who tells him. She finds him in the lounge; her sharp knock startles him out of his studying.

“Better get going,” she says flatly, and the look on her face bodes nothing good. “Flyboy’s in trouble.”

He’s halfway down the corridor before he wonders how he’d known she’d meant Keith.

Aya had pointed him to the simulators, but Shiro needn’t have asked – the sounds of the scuffle carry down the corridor, along with the chatter of dozens of gossiping students. Shiro rounds the corner to find Keith being restrained by two junior officers, while another cadet’s got his collar in the grip of Captain Montgomery himself. Shiro can’t see Keith at the moment, but the other cadet has a nasty bruise already blooming around his eye and a split lip.

(And he remembers – Keith never pulls his punches, not even in sparring matches.)

“What’s going on?” Shiro asks, stepping around the other cadets and turning to Montgomery.

“Got into a fight,” the senior officer explains shortly, nodding his head to the cadet he’s restraining. The kid – _James,_ Shiro knows his name – looks away sullenly. Shiro frowns from him to Keith, who stands similarly reticent, scowling at a spot somewhere around Montgomery’s knees.

“The other kid started it,” one of the junior officers, Carles, points out.

“I did _not,_ ” James protests vehemently, ignoring the way Montgomery jerks him back a bit to shut him up. “ _He_ punched me—”

Keith bares his teeth. “Only because _you_ —”

“That is _enough_!” Montgomery cuts them both off with a glare that has even Shiro flinching. The cadets fall silent, looking cowed. “Both of you have displayed behavior severely inappropriate for students of this institution. I expected better of both of you.” He frowns particularly hard at Keith. “Especially you, Kogane.”

Shiro doesn’t miss the there-and-gone-again expression on Keith’s face, a mixture of guilt and shame and chagrin.  He purses his lips and turns back to his senior officer.

“Can I take Keith from here?” he asks, to the surprise of everyone around them – even Keith. Maybe even himself.

Montgomery raises his eyebrows. There’s a pause while the senior officer considers the situation, then he nods.

“Sort him out, Shirogane,” is all he says, and Shiro exhales in relief.

“Yes, sir.”

 

Shiro’s short on options for where they can have this discussion properly, so they end up on the roof of the simulator building. The place, like the basement door in the cadet dorms, is notoriously easy to break into – and more importantly, private. Shiro jimmies the lock and shoulders the door open carefully, ushering Keith out onto the deck and shutting the door behind them.

Keith scuffs his foot on the ground, arms caged protectively around himself, and doesn’t look up.

Shiro sighs.

“Keith,” he says, as gently as he can manage. “Keith, look at me.”

The cadet’s gaze remains pointedly fixed downward.

Shiro’s mouth pinches for a moment, then he sighs again. He knows enough about Keith by now to realize that pushing is often the worse option. So instead he moves forward slowly, telegraphing his motions, and lays a hand on Keith’s shoulder.

“If you want to explain,” he says softly, “I’ll listen.”

They’re both silent for a long, long moment. Keith keeps his head bowed. Shiro doesn’t move away.

“It was what he said,” comes the quiet admission, eventually. Shiro squeezes his arm, briefly, but doesn’t press. Keith allows the touch before drawing back and settling himself on the ground. His hands fidget in his lap; Shiro notices the contusion and blood on Keith’s knuckles. There’s a bruise high on his cheek. The cadet’s shoulders heave as he takes a deep breath. “He just—”

Smiling ruefully, Shiro takes a seat beside Keith, knocks their shoulders together.

( _I'm listening._ )

“He was talking shit about how I wasn’t anything special, I just had you to help me and the officers were playing favorites.” Keith’s expression twists; his hands close into fists momentarily. “And then he – he said _you_ weren’t anything special either, you just sucked up to officers and and they were playing favorites there too because you didn’t have any real skills to back it up, and the only reason they put me on the fast track was because I was your pet project and—”

Keith’s voice stumbles to a halt as he runs out of breath, still too wound up and angry. His hands are squeezing open-shut in his lap; his jaw is clenched shut. Shiro looks at him and realizes, in a rush: Keith is angry _for him._

He shouldn’t, but he feels a little pleased, regardless.

“Anyway.” Keith rubs at his nose, smearing a little blood over his upper lip. “I just – wanted him to shut up. He was _wrong,_ ” and he says it with such vehemence that Shiro can picture him in the middle of the fight, teeth bared and fist raised. A feral stray cat.

It makes a corner of his mouth quirk up, despite himself.

Keith falls quiet, going back to staring at his hands in his lap. Shiro takes a minute to mull over his words and what he wants to tell Keith.

“You know,” he says slowly, looking out onto the desert. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone said that.”

He sees Keith raise his head abruptly in his peripheral vision, perplexed and shocked. And gods, how does he explain this, how does he explain how that makes him feel – that Keith is so sincere in his perception of Shiro as nothing but good, as having nothing but good. He doesn’t have the words for that kind of warmth.

(Perhaps not now, not yet.)

“‘Playing favorites’ is pretty light, all things considered,” Shiro admits. “I’ve heard worse, and been told worse. It didn’t stop when I graduated to junior officer, not when I got to assist a moon flight, not even now.”

“But that’s not _fair._ ” Keith’s half-turned to him now, frustration in sharp lines all over his body. Shiro shifts to face him and exhales a soft smile, reaching out to take Keith’s injured hand.

“No,” he says, “it’s not. But I know that, and the people around me know that, and for me that’s all that matters. People are flawed; it’s not like I don’t see where the resentment comes from. I think I just—” He pauses, considering. He hasn’t _gotten used to it,_ no, but – “I learned not to listen.”

Keith’s hand tightens in his. “They’re still wrong about you, though,” he says stubbornly, pursed lips and pink cheeks.

Shiro huffs a laugh under his breath. “They’re wrong about _you,_ too,” he points out. The other boy’s expression shutters as his eyes cut away, and Shiro feels a tiny sting. He leans forward. “They are, Keith. You _are_ special, I’ve seen it, I know it more than enough by now. You’re the best pilot in your class.”

“Only because you taught me,” Keith mutters.

“No.” Shiro ducks his head to deliberately look Keith in the eye. “Because you know how to fly.”

Wide, uncertain eyes stare back at Shiro. He eases his grip, smoothing his thumb over bruised knuckles. Keith’s skin is calloused against his own.

“I won’t let you sell yourself short,” he says gently. “You’re too good for that.”

Keith’s eyes cut away again. His fingers fidget against Shiro’s. He bites his lip, worrying it between his teeth. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nods.

Shiro’s smile softens. “But thank you,” he adds, “for defending my honor.”

It makes Keith roll his eyes, but he also finally smiles back, so Shiro counts it as a win.

(Keith’s hand is still in his, so warm.)

 

Shiro walks Keith back to the cadet dorms in case there’s any more trouble. He hears the murmuring, knows Keith can too, but when he checks beside him Keith is walking the same way he always does – head up, with that familiar almost-grace. It makes the pride flare in Shiro’s chest.

He doesn’t see the other cadet as he leaves, but that might be for the best. Shiro doesn’t know what he’d say if he ever did.

The walk back to his own room is one of introspection. Shiro is well aware of his own reputation within the Garrison, of the people who call him the _golden boy_ and the people who think he needs to be knocked down a peg. He knows there are people who admire him and people who resent him. And it bothers him, it still does, it makes his hackles rise when he hears someone mutter that he only gets to assist mission flights because he sucks up to the senior officers. He’s just learned that leaving their flight scores in the dust is better than decking them in the face.

(He shouldn’t be happy about that, honestly, but he is anyway.)

Thinking about Keith inevitably leads to thinking about all the ways Keith has fit into his life, insinuating himself so neatly into spaces Shiro hadn’t even realized he’d made. And maybe he does see a lot of himself in Keith, with a desire to chase horizons and a forthrightness that doesn’t apologize for itself, but.

But he’s the upstanding type. Keith’s the upending type.

Shiro exhales and thinks that yeah, he really does feel upended when he’s around this boy.

 

.o0o.

 

The weeks go by. Keith has no more incidents that Shiro hears about, although when he records Montgomery’s class records he has to smirk at the noticeably uptick in Keith’s flight scores. The cadets on the fast track have started being assigned flight hours to fill, and Shiro can’t always be there to teach Keith or supervise. But those skills have always been entirely Keith’s own; he’d always been good enough.

It’s gratifying and delightful, seeing the results.

Shiro’s own flight records are steadily improving, and now with the rumor of a major expedition on the horizon, he pushes himself further. Graduation and promotion loom over the junior officers, all of them doubling down on their work. Shiro finds himself bunked down in the lounge or the library with Matt on one side, buried in reviewers, and Aya on the other with her papers and calculations. Most nights Shiro goes back to his dorm, eyes strained and head hurting, mind crammed with information that feels like it’s leaking out of his ears.

Sometimes, when Shiro feels like there are too many cracks than he can keep patched together, he puts away the notes and texts and manuals. Sometimes he goes off on his own, taking his bike for a ride so he can clear his head. Sometimes he heads to the gym to try and grind through it, taking out the keyed-up feeling on punching bags or another high-strung classmate. Sometimes he stays in his room, reading or meditating or sleeping.

Sometimes, he finds Keith.

They never do anything particularly special. Sometimes they spar, circling each other on the mats as Keith ducks around him and Shiro tries to pin him down. Sometimes they head out to the desert and Shiro lets Keith fly them around the hills, through the canyon, skirting over red, red dust. Sometimes they go to Pieira to eat, just good food and each other’s company. And some evenings Keith tugs Shiro up to the roof to sit in the cool desert air, just the two of them in the relative quiet.

In moments like those, Shiro looks at the boy beside him, at Keith under the night sky of the desert, looking up at all the stars, asking _how do you not feel so small with all that universe out there?_ At Keith gesturing towards the desert and admitting that the red rock and dust are all he’s known his whole life, that he’s always wondered what the ocean is like. Shiro looks at Keith and thinks about how they both got here.

There’s still so much about Keith that Shiro wants to discover, wants to unpack.

These days, Keith lets him.

Getting to know Keith is a bit like being in a messy room with the lights off. Shiro’s never sure what he’s going to touch when he reaches out, and even when he finds something, he’s not always sure what to make of it. Sometimes that uncertainty keeps him still, keeps him quiet and waiting, all deliberate breaths and tucked-away feelings. He knows, though, that there’s no single switch for him to flick on that illuminates everything, knows he needs to earn each fragment that Keith gives him. He knows the whole picture, if and when he’ll see it, is something spectacular.

Getting to know Keith is like being in a messy room with the lights off, so it’s a good thing Shiro’s never been afraid of the dark.

He reaches out, carefully, and takes the time to turn over the moments and pieces of Keith that he gets to see.

Like now.

Somehow or other they’ve gotten on the topic of soulmates. They’re out on the roof again, in the lull between the end of class and dinnertime. Shiro has his mouth pinched around an odd little feeling, part hesitation and part melancholy and part something he can’t define. He wants to ask why Keith’s asking.

“No,” he finally says, softly. He leans back on his hands and looks up to a sky that’s turning red as the desert that stretches out in front of them. If he looks to the left, he’ll see Keith in all the colors of the setting sun, flecks of light in eyes like the cosmos. So he doesn’t look.

“No,” Shiro says again, with a faint smile. “It’s not that I don’t believe they exist, just—” He breaks off, biting his lip. “I don’t like it. The idea of the universe pre-determining something like that.”

“Really?” Keith sounds genuinely bemused.

Shiro snorts, a little self-deprecating. This time he does look. “Is that really so surprising.”

Keith glances at him slantwise for a moment, then drops his gaze. One hand absently fiddles with the cuff of his uniform.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Just seems like something you’d believe in.”

Shiro glances at Keith out of the corner of his eye, but the cadet is resolutely looking out into the desert. He’s tempted to ask what had led Keith to believe that of him, why Keith thinks he gives off that impression. But it skirts dangerous territory, and Shiro knows better than to push when Keith’s sitting beside him here quietly, open and honest in ways people rarely get to see.

So he turns away, tips his head back to the darkening sky. Asks, carefully, “do you?”

They’re silent for a few long moments. The floodlights around the Garrison perimeter are starting to come on. Shiro thinks, absent-mindedly, that they should head inside soon if they want to beat the dinner rush.

“No,” comes the quiet reply, and when Shiro chances a look, his breath catches at the sight of Keith, bathed in the last of the sunlight. There’s a peculiar twist to Keith’s mouth, not quite amusement and not quite wistfulness. His expression has shuttered. “Not really, no.”

Shiro wants to ask. Wants to reach out and see if Keith is as warm as the sun paints him. Wants to say that he doesn’t like the universe dictating that sort of irrevocability but he’s willing to have it change his mind.

He exhales, soft, and nods.

“Okay.”

 

.o0o.

 

These are the things Keith never tells Shiro, never tells anyone. These are the things he thinks when he hears the people around him talk about _soulmates,_ when they speculate and gossip and talk wistful. These are the things he has learned growing up, over years and quiet moments and back-alley scrap fights:

Soulmates are a pretty concept, this idea that there’s one person somewhere out there, irrevocably and inevitably tied to you. Keith can see the appeal in the notion, but he’s also seen the other sides to things. He knows now, that being in love doesn't always mean being soulmates, and that being soulmates doesn’t always mean being good for each other. He knows far too much about impermanence and being left behind.

Keith has learned on far harsher occasions: you don't set your foundations on someone else's shoulders. You don't build homes in people. You don't let someone's smile make you feel like a desert lightning storm.

(You don't root yourself to anything that you can't leave just as easily.)

Soulmates are a pretty concept, but the thought of being tied to someone when Keith's got sights set on universe unknown – it shutters something inside of him. He’s got dreams of chasing the horizon, forward and up and away from the nothing he’s got here. All of his intentions have been to uproot himself from this desert and keep going.

When all he has left are his knife, his combat skills, and his freedom; when he's seen what soulmate can mean outside the pretty stories, well.

Keith's lived without more essential things.

But time and time again, Shiro’s found ways to wreck Keith's best laid plans and intentions. He makes himself so easy to lean on. Shiro is steadiness and permanence, a star pulling Keith into orbit.

If he weren't so disillusioned, Keith might be inclined to think it fate.

(Still, if he has to be drawn to someone that irrevocably, then Shiro's better than anything the universe has ever given him.)

(Little does he know.)

 

.o0o.

 

“So why the Garrison?” Shiro asks one day, apropos of nothing. They’re at the burger joint in town, enjoying a rare free afternoon where Keith doesn’t have flight hours to put in and Shiro doesn’t have an avalanche of work and junior officer duties. They’ve made a routine of it, taking turns picking somewhere to eat and seeing if they can’t get out early enough to take the hoverbike out for a while. Keith has a spare key now, just in case. The increase in Keith’s workload has meant he can’t get out to (illegally) participate in (illegal) races anymore, but he’s not going to stop flying altogether.

They never head anywhere in particular, just out and out into the desert, until Shiro squeezes Keith’s waist to signal that they should head back. Shiro knows now how much flying is shaped into Keith’s bones, as part and parcel to him as breathing. And while yes, the Garrison could get him to fly, get him up and chasing the horizon – Keith doesn’t seem to fit here, not really. He’s never quite settled. Oh, he toes the lines, of course, follows Garrison code and attends his classes. Keith’s never had a problem with structure and regulation so long as it makes sense; Shiro understands this now. But it hasn’t stopped him from scoffing at the Garrison’s words of _bringing out your full potential_ and _working together to further humanity._

Keith’s just here to fly.

 _So why the Garrison,_ Shiro asks, then, casually picking up a French fry. _Why here,_ is what he means, why here specifically where he’d landed himself in Shiro’s life and turned it upside-down, why here where he’d quietly and unobtrusively inserted himself in the spaces between Shiro’s ribs. Keith hadn’t happened to Shiro in the same way as most other things that have changed his life so irrevocably. He’d snuck up on Shiro like a peculiar stray cat, there and then _there_ in Shiro’s life, taking up more and more room.

If Shiro were the type to ascribe wholeheartedly to soulmates, then he’d put it all on the universe, that Keith had ended up here. Chalk it up to Fate, all the incidents in their lives that had brought them to this point of reality, sitting together in a booth at a burger joint as Keith steals his fries.

(Perhaps he still might. It’s a pretty idea, that everything that’s happened to them has conspired to lead them here. Sometimes Keith turns wide, violet-grey eyes on Shiro and he’s willing to believe in the magnetic pull of this firebright boy.)

Keith idly stirs his straw through his milkshake, clearly mulling over the question. Shiro takes the opportunity to put a few more fries on his plate.

“Because space,” Keith says, finally. He takes a sip of his drink, then looks up. There’s a softness to the edge of his expression.

Shiro waits a beat for him to elaborate, then raises an eyebrow. “Space...?” he prompts, tilting his head to the side.

Keith gives him a mildly exasperated look, but when Shiro keeps looking at him expectantly, he sighs.

“Hmm.” One slender finger idles around the rim of the milkshake glass. “Space is – there’s just so _much_ of it out there, and it’s massive and it just – goes on, right? It’s constantly changing, and there’s so much we don’t know, like we’re just starting to reach the Kuiper belt and that isn’t even the edge of our solar system. We haven’t even really landed on other planets, just a few moons, so who knows what we haven’t found yet.” Keith ducks his head a bit, playing with his fork. “And I wanna be out there looking for it.”

(The way he looks as he talks, eyes all lit up and a flush of color high on his cheeks – it knocks Shiro breathless.)

He huffs out a small laugh, fond and amused and warm. Reaches out to tap a finger against Keith’s hand where it’s clenched around the base of his glass. Smiles when Keith looks up, embarrassed.

Says, “it’d suit you, being out there.”

Keith’s lips part on the softest exhale.

“You think?” and the way he looks – it takes the breath from Shiro’s lungs.

“Yeah.” And this, Shiro believes wholeheartedly: Keith belongs in the spaces between stars. “Yeah I do.”

 

.o0o.

 

The year goes on. Shiro continues to teach Keith, to find all these little excuses and reasons to stay with him just a little more. Being on the fast track of the Garrison fighter pilot program means more difficult flight simulations, and Keith wheedles Shiro into helping him practice until he gets them in the required amount of time and with fewer and fewer penalties. Their sparring record remains frustratingly even.

Graduation comes and goes. Shiro is top of his class, to the surprise of no one. He touches the small medal pinned to his breast and grins.

“Congratulations, hotshot,” Aya teases, coming up beside him. He huffs and throws an arm around her shoulder, squeezing her to his side.

“I kind of feel like I shouldn’t be graduating yet,” he admits. She elbows him in the ribs, both of them laughing.

“Think we’ll be out there soon?” she asks, expression turning wistful as she turns to survey the rest of their classmates milling around them. When she looks back at Shiro, a corner of her mouth is lifted in a small smile.

Shiro gives her one of his own, then looks out over the auditorium. Matt spots him from the other side and throws an arm in the air, waving it exaggeratedly, the biggest smile on his face. Shiro shakes his head, but it makes him laugh all the same.

“I hope so,” he says, quiet and honest.

It’s why he’s here, after all: to chase the stars and the spaces between them. To fly.

 

Shiro doesn’t see Keith during or immediately after the ceremony, but he’s not surprised. He knows Keith well enough by now to understand that times like these, the pomp and circumstance, it doesn’t sit well with the other boy. So after all the well-wishes and hugs, after all the photos, after he promises Aya that _yes,_ he’ll be there for the afterparty – Shiro steals away and heads up to the roof. He finds Keith sitting out there, flipping idly through a book. Keith looks up when Shiro emerges, eyes flicking over the new stripe on Shiro’s shoulder, the medal on his breast.

It’s one of Shiro’s favorite expressions, the amusement tucked in a corner of Keith’s mouth, eyes bright with humor.

“Congratulations,” Keith quips, setting his book down and getting up. He shuffles a bit awkwardly, then sticks out a hand.

Shiro raises an eyebrow. Keith shrugs, mouth twisted. Exhaling a small laugh, Shiro takes the proffered hand and uses it to tug the other boy forward into a hug.

“Thank you, Keith,” he says, soft, fond.

There’s a small hesitation, and then lithe arms come up to wrap around his waist. Shiro smiles as Keith’s hands curl into the back of his jacket and his head tucks a little uncertainly against Shiro’s shoulder. He squeezes Keith once, briefly, then shifts away.

Keith stands there for a moment, flexing his hands like he doesn’t know where to put them. He looks at Shiro, then away.

“I, uh.” It’s too dark to see but right now, Shiro would bet the contents of his wallet that Keith’s blushing. “I got you something. For. Y’know.”

He fumbles around inside his jacket, then holds something out. Shiro takes it, pleased but puzzled. It’s – a flower, one of the desert species that crop up all around the Garrison perimeter, with small purple petals that bleed into white near the center. It’s been flattened between two glass plates, the kind common to the science labs; the edges have been sealed shut.

“So it doesn’t die,” the cadet points out, half-mumbled.

Shiro turns the pressed flower back and forth. It’s clearly handmade, clumsily, but Shiro pictures Keith searching for a good flower to pick, taking it to a lab and figuring out how to preserve it himself. It’s such a simple gift, but something warm blooms in Shiro’s chest.

“I love it,” he says, sincerely, and looks at Keith.

He gets a tentative smile in return, unfurling slow over Keith’s lips until it reaches all the way to his eyes. It’s the most honest and unguarded Shiro has ever seen Keith. It takes his breath away.

“Thank you, Shiro,” Keith says, and he doesn’t say what for but he also doesn’t have to.

Shiro cradles the pressed flower in his palm and smiles back.

“Always.”

 

.o0o.

 

When the announcement for the Kerberos mission goes up, Shiro feels something slip inside him and take root. He stares at Commander Iverson where the officer is talking at the front of the room, addressing the collection of senior officers, outlining the mission brief. Talking about _pushing the reaches of space exploration_ and _a breakthrough for all humanity._ He informs everyone that Dr. Holt will be heading the mission and personally vetting his crew – one communications officer, one pilot.

The room breaks into chatter when the senior officers and Dr. Holt step down from the stage. The speculation is everywhere: who the pilot will be, the comm officer, the ground crew. Who’ll lead the engineering teams. Who gets to be on the mission of the century.

Beside Shiro, Aya’s grinning and socking Matt on the shoulder, asking if he’d known, demanding how he’d kept it quiet. Carles is talking excitedly with Matias, wondering if they’ll make it to the engineering crew. Some of his other classmates are discussing the logistics of it all, how feasible it’ll be.

Shiro just closes his eyes and thinks, _please._

This is everything he’s ever wanted.

 

He’s walking back to the dorms with some other junior officers when Lieutenant Ryu finds him.

“Officer Shirogane,” the man says, beckoning him over. There’s the faintest smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Sir,” Shiro answers, turning in salute.

(His heart thuds wild in his chest. He tries not to hope, he tries.)

“Come with me,” Ryu says. He turns to leave, in the direction of the Garrison command offices. Shiro’s breath catches in his throat; his mouth falls open a little. Around him, everyone has gone very quiet.

Ryu looks at him expectantly. Shiro takes a breath and nods.

“Yes, sir.”

 

Keith is the fourth person outside of Garrison command to learn that Shiro has been picked for the Kerberos mission.

Shiro tells him, in quiet words and hesitations, just the two of them out on the roof. Keith is rose and gold in the last of the sunlight. He’s looking out at the desert; Shiro wants to turn Keith’s head so he can read his expression.

Instead he sits there, and breathes, and waits.

Eventually, Keith exhales, shoulders slumping like something’s been taken out from inside him. He turns to Shiro and there’s the faintest smile crinkling the corners of his eyes and curling the corners of his mouth. There’s a warmth in Shiro’s chest that aches.

“I knew they’d pick you,” Keith admits softly. “You deserve it.”

Something winds tighter and tighter inside Shiro as he keeps looking at Keith, keeps searching for something even if he doesn’t know what to find. One side of his mouth lifts, a dry smile. “You think?”

“Yeah.” With every word Keith’s smile widens, like a crack in peeling paint. “If anyone deserves to pilot an expedition to the furthest reach of the solar system, it’s you.”

Shiro presses his lips together and breathes. Tries to find something to say. He’s happy but he’s terrified but he’s never wanted something so much in his life, and to hear Keith say that – it—

“I’m _happy_ for you, you idiot,” Keith says, all fond exasperation. He reaches out and digs his fingers into Shiro’s scalp, messing up his hair and shoving his head down. And then the tightness inside Shiro gives, and they’re both laughing, helpless and breathless and hiccupy. Shiro throws his arms around Keith and hauls him down, so Keith’s sprawled on top of him and Shiro’s on the floor.

“I’m going to Kerberos,” he says, grinning. He squeezes around Keith’s waist. Keith kicks him in the shin.

“Let me go, asshole,” he mock-gripes, but his fingers curl in the front of Shiro’s uniform. Shiro just laughs and rolls them to the side a bit, buries his face in Keith’s hair and breathes him in.

“I’m going to Kerberos,” he says again, a little quieter, a little more breathless. Keith’s hands clutch tighter.

“Yeah,” Keith says lightly; in the small gap between their bodies, it feels like a carefully-kept secret. He pulls back to look Shiro in the eye. “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Shiro stares at him for a moment, because _really._ Keith blinks up at him, all wide eyes and questioning gaze. Then they both crack up again, sprawled out on the ground, curled towards each other. Keith’s forehead touches Shiro’s shoulder, lightly.

When they calm down, laughter giving way to stifled giggles, Shiro turns his head to the side and catches Keith watching at him with the softest expression. Something warm blooms in his chest; his hand twitches where it lies over his ribs, in the oddest urge to reach out and brush his fingers over the pink of Keith’s cheeks.

Keith smiles at him, the sweetest curve of his mouth and crinkles at the corners of his eyes.

“You’re gonna do great, Takashi,” he says.

Shiro would give himself a hundred times over to hear his name in Keith’s voice again, as if it were a grace.

He shifts his other hand, hooks his fingers around Keith’s, just a little, in the space between them.

“Thanks, Keith.”

 

Shiro feels it as he’s walking back to his dorm room: the lightest tug on his hand, as if it’s been brushed by a kiss. When he looks down, there’s a red string looped around his left ring finger, trailing out and out. He can’t see where it fades off to, but he knows where it leads.

He turns his hand back and forth, looking at the string, and thinks of Keith.

Shiro isn’t religious by any means, but he still remembers bits and pieces of Bible verses and stories. _Bone of my bones;_ a person made whole out of another. He thinks of Keith and wonders about the parts of him that had coalesced only after finding and falling in love with this firebright boy. About his own ragged edges, the ones no one had seen, that fit neatly and easily against the lines of Keith’s body and heart.

Across days and stolen glances, Shiro has rearranged himself to allow Keith into his life. And while he still believes the universe doesn’t decide such absolutes, well.

There’s nothing in the universe quite like Keith.

 

.o0o.

 

This is something else that Keith doesn’t tell Shiro:

As he walks back to his dorm room, he feels the lightest tug on his hand. He stops, three corridors away from his room, unmindful of the other cadets walking around him. The red string has been on his finger a while now, although he’s kept quiet, kept the truth of it tucked away between his ribs. He knows, after all – you don’t build homes in people. Soulmates are just a pretty concept.

But the red string tugs, just a little.

Keith’s never doubted who’s on the other end.

He closes his hand into a fist and exhales, slow and deliberate. He starts walking again.

He has no defenses for the hope that blooms sweet in his heart.

 

.o0o.

 

They continue as they are. Shiro has less free time now as training for the Kerberos mission begins in earnest; his days stack up with flight simulations and calculations and a hundred different contingency plans. Dr. Holt stacks both him and Matt with dozens of reference texts that they need to study. The Garrison has them do artificial environmental immersion, recreating the conditions around Kerberos as best as they can on Earth.

“Kerberos at its lowest is -223°C,” Dr. Holt points out the first time, when both Shiro and Matt emerge from the Artificial Environment Room shivering and swearing like sailors.

“ _We know,_ ” they say simultaneously, teeth chattering. Dr. Holt raises an eyebrow with absolutely no sympathy.

“Just wait until they change up the gravity,” he says dryly, and Matt collapses to the floor. Dr. Holt pats his son on the head as he goes back to the lab.

Shiro and Matt also work closely with Aya and the rest the engineering team; given that they’ll be the only crew, they both need to understand the ship inside out. Aya still pouts about not being allowed on the mission.

“You’re going to _Kerberos,_ ” she whines, deliberately sitting on Matt while he’s lying underneath one of the shuttle’s wing sections. Matt lets out a choked sound and jerks, trying to throw her off. Aya ignores him completely. “That’s the furthest we’ve gone, like, _ever._ ”

Shiro hums thoughtfully from where he’s studying the blueprints. “There’ll be other expeditions,” he says, over Matt’s wheezed _help me._

“Yeah, but they won’t be this one.” Aya leans her elbows on her knees and props her chin on her hands. Matt makes a garbled noise of exasperation, shoving at their friend ineffectively.

“You’re still technically _on_ the Kerberos mission, you know,” Shiro points out, looking over at them briefly. Matt has given up and lies flopped on the floor. “Ground control and engineering are just as important.”

Aya rolls her eyes, but she’s still smiling. “I know, I know.” Her expression turns a little mischievous. “Maybe I’ll hit up Prodigy while we’re both waiting for you to come back.”

Shiro shakes his head, turning back to the blueprints, refusing to give her the satisfaction. Aya watches him for a few more moments before finally getting off Matt and returning to her work. Matt groans in relief, wheezing just a bit and massaging his pelvis. Thankfully, this time he makes no comment.

Shiro’s been trying not to think about Keith too much, because doing that eventually leads to thinking about leaving Keith behind. And it’s ridiculous, he knows, because he’s about to embark on a groundbreaking mission that will push the frontiers of human exploration in space even further, but.

(But a thousand different things could happen out there; but Shiro could leave and Keith could move on; but Shiro doesn’t know if soulmate strings hold, that far out in space, when he hasn't yet asked if Keith feels the same. But there are too many ways in which they could change in three years. _But_ a lot of things.)

“You’re thinking too much,” Matt says, startling Shiro out of his maudlin thoughts. He looks around to find his friend watching him, eyebrows raised and expression amused.

“There’s a lot to think about,” Shiro deflects, raising the blueprints a little to hide his face.

He can still feel Matt staring at him, and after a few moments, his friend heaves a sigh. He reaches out, pushes Shiro’s wrist down so he can look his friend in the eye. Shiro shifts his gaze a little to the left. Matt rolls his eyes.

“You’ll be _fine,_ ” he says firmly, and it’s just three words but Shiro knows what he means.

He really hopes it’s true.

 

Shiro has less free time now, but every so often he’ll find some room amid all the work he has to do. Sometimes he and Keith go out – to town, to the desert, to escape for a little while and let Shiro _breathe._ Sometimes they simply go up to the roof and talk, like now.

“I’m a little jealous,” Keith admits quietly. It’s a little after dinner; the light from the Garrison floodlights illuminates the other boy in patches so Shiro can’t see his expression.

“Of what?” Shiro asks, eyebrows raised.

Keith plucks at the sleeve of his jacket and smiles faintly. “Of you.”

Shiro blinks. “Me?”

It prompts a soft laugh out of Keith. He lets his hands fall to his lap. “You get to go out there, don’t you? First men on Kerberos, first men past the Kuiper belt. Pushing the reaches of space exploration.” He ducks his head. “It’s why we’re all here.”

Shiro looks at the other boy for a long moment, and remembers: Keith with bright eyes, _I wanna be out there looking for it._ He chuckles under his breath. “There’ll be other firsts, you know,” he points out. “You could be the first past the Milky Way. First to land on Jupiter.”

“First to get nine different disciplinary citations in the cadet course,” Keith mutters under his breath, which just makes Shiro laugh harder.

“First to break my Venus orbit flight record on the simulator,” he counters.

“First to break _all_ your cadet records on the simulator,” Keith replies smugly, and though Shiro rolls his eyes, he still feels a burst of fondness in his chest.

“True.” A year and a half is a long time, and they’ve both come a long way. Shiro looks at Keith and remembers a scrappy kid in an alleyway changing out of the Garrison uniform. A recklessness and intensity that Keith hadn’t always known how to direct or control. Keith pitching them off the cliff, that first time on the hoverbike.

(Keith in Shiro’s mind is made up of many small things and moments, packed to overflowing in a box.)

They sit there quiet for a few moments. Shiro glances up at the sky. It still hasn’t quite sunk in that he’s going to be out there soon.

“You’re going to be so far away,” Keith says softly, and his voice sounds so small.

Shiro turns to look at him, but the other boy’s expression is half-hidden in the faint light. Still, Keith’s tone is enough to make him feel slightly brittle.

“True,” he says again, with a wry smile. Carefully, carefully, he shifts so he’s facing Keith. His left hand reaches out, hooks fingers around Keith’s and squeezes lightly. “But I’ll be coming back.” His mouth twists around all the things he wants to say. “Tell you what – when I do, when they let me, I’ll take a couple of days off. I’ll take you to California. We can go see the ocean.”

(Keith in Shiro’s mind is so many small things and moments collected but they can never sum up the way Keith makes Shiro feel, like there are galaxies in his hands and lungs and heart.)

Keith’s fingers tighten around Shiro’s for a moment, and then abruptly he tugs so Shiro leans forward, just a bit. Then he’s got an armful of Keith, a forehead pressed to his shoulder and trembling hands clutched on his jacket.

“You’ll come back,” Keith says into the space between them.

Shiro blinks, then smiles. And just like the night Shiro had told Keith he was leaving, he wraps his arms around Keith and buries his face in Keith’s hair, breathes him in.

“Yeah.”

 

(Keith in Shiro’s mind is many, many things but most of all he is everything.)

 

.o0o.

 

The pre-launch party is decidedly _not_ Shiro’s idea. In fact, he tries to dissuade Matt and Aya and their other friends from organizing it, but they are all frighteningly determined. They make _lists,_ writing down food to bring and booze to buy and—

“We are _not_ having a karaoke machine,” Shiro says adamantly, pulling the pen out of Matt’s hand before he can note it down.

“What?” Matt stares at him, affronted.

“Killjoy,” Aya mutters, glaring at him.

“ _No._ ” Shiro frowns at them both.

They don’t get the karaoke machine.

There are entirely too many people at the party, as it snowballs from just the officers in their class to a seemingly Garrison-wide affair. Shiro doesn’t know who’s in charge of the music, but he appreciates the old school selection (and it’s better than what Matt would have played). He’s just finished chugging a drink – egged on by his classmates – when he sees Keith on the other side of the room.

“Gotta go for a bit,” he says, laughing as he ducks out of the little circle of people. He waves off Carles’ attempt to get him to do one more shot, then weaves through the crowd. It takes a little while to find Keith, but he eventually spots him with a Aya and Matias off by one of the food tables.

“Ah, there’s the man of the hour,” Aya calls once he’s within earshot, grinning at him. He cocks an eyebrow at her, making her laugh.

“Matt is on the Kerberos mission too,” he reminds her, and they all turn to look at where Matt is surrounded by the other officers, talking with some very large gestures. Shiro decides he doesn’t want to know, and glances back at Keith. “You better not be drinking.”

Keith looks away, eyes wide, taking a sip from his cup.

“Oh, let him live,” Matias says, cuffing Shiro on the shoulder. “It’s one night and we’re celebrating.”

Shiro gives him a pointed look.

“It’s juice,” Aya finally admits, huffing and rolling her eyes. Behind his cup, Keith cracks a smile. Aya nudges him in the side, then turns to Shiro in fond exasperation. “You act like we’re terrible influences.”

“You are,” Shiro says unsympathetically, then dodges when she tries to sock him in the stomach.

“Fuck off,” she says, laughing. Shiro raises his eyebrows, then ducks again when she makes to smack him on the head. “God, _fine,_ we’ll leave you alone with Prodigy so you can save him from being corrupted by our evil ways.” She ruffles Shiro’s hair, then moves over to weave her arm through Matias’ and pull him away. “Have fun, you two!” she calls over her shoulder.

Shiro flips her off before turning to Keith.

“It really is juice,” the cadet says defensively, before Shiro can even open his mouth. He snorts, tapping Keith on the side of the head.

“It’s fine,” he says, smiling.

Keith gives him a skeptical look, but he’s smiling around the rim of his cup. Shiro looks at him for a moment, at the light sheen of sweat on his skin that makes him glow under the party lights. There’s a flush on Keith’s cheeks, whether from the heat or embarrassment or something else, Shiro doesn’t know. But something’s winding inside Shiro tighter and tighter, as his eyes flick down to Keith’s mouth, as he thinks about how he’s leaving in a few days, as he—

“Dance with me,” he says, impulsively, surprising them both.

“What?” Keith asks, looking at Shiro askance.

“Dance with me,” Shiro repeats, a little more certain now. He pries Keith’s cup from his hands and sets it down on the nearby table, then takes Keith by the wrists and tugs him lightly forward.

“I don’t – I don’t know how to dance,” Keith protests, looking mildly alarmed.

Grinning, Shiro tugs him a little closer. “You’ll be fine.”

And Keith – really doesn’t know how to dance, although he tries. He laughs when Shiro spins him, tries not to stumble over his own feet, awkwardly shimmies his shoulders. And Shiro knows there’s an entire party going on around them but he can’t tear his eyes away, caught as he is in the pull of Keith’s eyes and in the way their proximity makes him feel electric. Keith braces himself against Shiro a bit as he tries to catch his breath. Shiro looks at where his left hand is clasped in Keith’s right, and he can see the red string around his ring finger, knows it leads up to where Keith’s palm is pressed, warm, just to the right of his heart.

And Shiro thinks: leaving is made both easy and hard by having someone to come back to. But it’s reassuring, to know where Keith will be after he leaves. There are no fixed points in space, but – selfish as it is – Keith will still be here as Shiro goes further and further away.

He’s struck by the sudden urge to pull the other boy close, to kiss soft hair and breathe Keith in, commit everything to memory – the way Keith leans against him, the smell of his shampoo, the feel of a warm and calloused palm in his own. And he almost does, almost.

Then Keith pulls back a little, still laughing breathlessly. Shiro exhales a small smile. He feels the happiest and saddest he’s ever been in his life, but.

Maybe leaving won’t be so bad, if he has this to come home to.

 

(There are no fixed points in space, but there is where Keith is, and where Shiro is, and that is enough.)

 

  
[ art commission by [**@AetherStaza**](https://twitter.com/AetherStaza) ]

 

He wakes up the next morning to the emptiness of his dorm room, all his things neatly packed away into storage. He and Matt have the morning off to spend time with family and friends, bring them to the launch site ahead of the quarantine period. Or, well – Matt will be with his family, saying his goodbyes along with his father.

Shiro’s only got one person he wants there with him.

Keith looks as bleary and rumpled as he always does early in the morning. He’s dressed in his cadet uniform, although his jacket is done up one button off. Shiro’s mouth twists in amusement as he approaches, already reaching out to tug at the jacket front teasingly.

“I thought you were old enough to dress yourself,” he quips, and grins unrepentantly when Keith glares at him.

“I will go back to bed,” Keith threatens, but it’s ruined by a yawn. He fixes the buttons of his jacket, anyway.

The launch site is full of activity, with dozens of people rushing around doing safety checks or carrying equipment or running other protocols. Shiro spots Matt with the rest of his family near the spaceship and waves. He’ll head over later to greet Mrs. Holt and Matt’s sister, Katie, later. For now, he tips his head in the direction of the ship and smirks at Keith.

“Wanna get a closer look?” he asks, winking.

Keith rolls his eyes, but he still follows Shiro excitedly as he leads them round to the ship. And he certainly looks more awake than usual as he listens to Shiro explain as best as he can how the flight will work – the thrust sequences, the way they’ll be relying on the gravity on some planets a little, the secondary engine systems Shiro will have to use to land them safely. Shiro’s gestures get more emphatic the more he talks, and he’s in the middle of a highly technical description of the ship’s recycled air systems when he catches himself. He turns to Keith sheepishly only to find the cadet watching him with an expression that’s part fondness, part amusement, part – something else Shiro can’t place.

“Sorry,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Got a bit carried away.”

Keith huffs a small laugh and shakes his head. “It’s fine. I like hearing it.”

It sparks that little bloom of warmth inside Shiro again. He smiles a little ruefully, then glances back at the ship. In a few days he’ll be piloting it to the furthest reach of their solar system.

Sometimes it still doesn’t quite feel real.

They’re quiet for a little while, then Shiro exhales long and slow. He reaches into his pocket and squeezes cold metal, trying to find his courage.

(Funny, but right now this feels more terrifying than the thought of going up into space.)

“Keith,” he says, softly, and the name feels like a lifeline.

Keith turns to look at him, eyes wide and questioning, and Shiro remembers the first time he’d gotten a good look at the other boy. His gaze still leaves Shiro a little stunned, reminds Shiro of the inexorable pull of the cosmos.

He takes his left hand out of his pocket, uncurls his fingers. “Here.”

There is a terrifying moment as Keith looks at the tags sitting in Shiro’s palm and Shiro reminds himself of how to breathe. Then Keith turns his gaze up to Shiro, lips lightly parted, and there’s an echo there of how Shiro feels.

“I want you to keep these for me,” he adds, because Keith still looks like he’s not sure what to do.

Slowly, carefully, Keith reaches out and takes the tags from Shiro. The metal clinks, a soft sound, as he drapes them over his fingers. Keith stares at them, and it’s like he wants to say _something_ but he doesn’t know what.

“Won’t you need them?” he eventually asks, looking up at Shiro with a small frown.

Shiro shrugs, corner of his mouth quirking up. “Who’s gonna identify me out in space?”

Something shutters in Keith’s expression, and Shiro winces. His apology is to reach out, wrapping his hand around Keith’s and trapping the tags in his grip.

“I’ll get them back when we come home,” he says, softly.

 _I want to give you more than just an abstract bond,_ he thinks. _I want you to have something while I can’t say these things, not yet. Because I know soulmate strings hold, out in space, but what if it’s too far, what if things change, what if._ But that, he keeps that to himself.

Keith’s mouth twists into a little pout, but he looks less uncertain now. His eyes flick from their hands to Shiro’s face, that by-now familiar expression like he’s trying to suss something out. Then he nods.

“I’ll hold you to that, Takashi.”

 

Shiro watches Keith walk away from the launch site, feels the tug of the red string on his hand. He’s never known a goodbye to feel so inadequate, but he doesn’t know what else he might have done or said. He hopes it’s enough, until he gets back, until he can tell Keith everything.

“Shiro.” Dr. Holt calls out to him from where he stands with Matt, over with a group of engineers and several Garrison officers. He gestures Shiro over. “Time to go.”

It feels like the edge of a precipice, like that brilliant and terrifying moment when Keith had pitched them off the cliff. Shiro inhales, exhales. Squares his shoulders.

He goes.


	2. interludes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knows the news will be spreading around the Garrison by now. He knows the Kerberos ground crew had held off as long as they could, done as much as they could. He knows the way Aya’s voice sounds when it’s raw and hoarse, telling Keith _I’m sorry._
> 
> Keith knows there are 4.67 billion miles between Earth and Kerberos, between the point where he is and where Shiro is not.
> 
> Shiro.

* * *

 

##  **Keith**

 

Keith’s days with Shiro gone are quiet.

He goes to class, does better and better on the simulator. He has his first basic survival training and learns why Shiro would always complain about sand so much. He sees Shiro’s fellow officers – Aya and Matias and Carles, all the others – every so often, in the corridors or the cafeteria or sometimes even in his class, when they assist the instructors. But there is a significant _lack_ in his life, something he feels every time he turns to say something only to remember Shiro isn’t here.

Keith goes through his days, goes to sleep. He keeps mostly to himself, just as he’d always done, before Shiro had come along.

Things are quiet.

 

The morning is also quiet when Aya knocks on his door with red-rimmed eyes and words that fracture Keith from inside-out.

 

The desert stretches out to the horizon, red and dry and endless.

There is a metaphor in there somewhere, about how Keith himself feels, but he can’t think of one at the moment.

He doesn’t know what to think at all, really.

He knows the news will be spreading around the Garrison by now. He knows the Kerberos ground crew had held off as long as they could, done as much as they could. He knows the way Aya’s voice sounds when it’s raw and hoarse, telling Keith _I’m sorry._

Keith knows there are 4.67 billion miles between Earth and Kerberos, between the point where he is and where Shiro is not.

Shiro _._

The hoverbike he’s nicked, with the spare key given to him long ago, belongs to Shiro. The tags he has in his pocket belong to Shiro. The last time he’d been here was with Shiro and the red string on his finger leads to Shiro and Shiro, _Shiro—_

Keith crumples into himself where he sits on a ledge, under an outcropping, out in the canyons.

Even the desert is quiet.

(This is the problem when you find someone you would move heaven and earth for: heaven and earth don’t always feel the same way.)

Keith digs fingers into his arms and sits there thinking of everything he’s lost and everything he has left.

A collection of memories and the feeling of breathing into empty spaces.

A love with a half-life of forever, decaying slowly in his bones and sitting restless under his skin.

Keith looks out to the sky and thinks about how everything now feels like an epilogue to a story where he meets Shiro and falls in love with him and then loses him.

 _So much for California_ , he thinks, and almost laughs.

 

(The red string is still around his finger.)

 

.o0o.

 

It’s an accident that Keith finds Katie Holt.

He knows _of_ her, of course, has heard Matt talk about her time and time again. He’d seen her briefly, that morning before the Kerberos launch, when Shiro had brought him over to show him the ship. His first impressions of her had been of a slight, sunny girl who clearly adored her brother. The resemblance had been striking, and Keith’s been told enough to know she’s just as smart.

He probably should have been less surprised to find her sneaking into the Garrison.

He’s not the only one who’d lost someone on Kerberos, after all.

It’s past lights out, and Keith should be in bed, but there’s a restlessness under his skin like a desert sandstorm. He hates staying still, unable to do anything, almost as much as he hates walking outside his room and hearing the noise, seeing the looks, feeling a distance almost palpable between him and everyone else.

As if Keith were a ghost; as if he walked with wolves instead of ill-worn grief.

(The words are a drum beat down his spine, a haunting: _pilot error, pilot error, pilot error._ )

It’s past lights out, but Keith’s well-versed in sneaking out of the dorms. He’s picking his way quietly across the grounds to where there’s a hidden break in the chainmail fencing when he hears a commotion in the main building. He thinks he hears Iverson’s voice, along with a few other other senior officers – and someone fairly young. There’s a lot of shouting.

Self-preservation tells Keith to _get the hell out of there._ He’s violating at least two different Garrison regulations as it is; Iverson won’t be in the mood for leniency or consideration if something’s already invoked his wrath.

But curiosity is a much more powerful draw, and so Keith steals through the rear entrance of the building that houses the Garrison command offices. Agitation keeps him hyper-aware, hyper-careful, ready to flee any moment. Slowly, cautiously, he peers around the corner.

Iverson is clutching at a tear in his sleeve, shouting something, while Lieutenant Ryu grapples with a cadet – no. Whoever it is, they’re casually dressed, jeans and a green shirt and definitely _not_ Garrison—

Keith inhales sharply, only just remembering to clamp his mouth shut so he doesn’t make any noise.

He recognizes the hair and the face.

It’s Katie.

He watches in shock as Lieutenant Ryu and Captain Montgomery proceed to drag her away. She’s putting up a good fight, twisting and straining, shouting something about how _the Garrison can’t keep things covered up_ and – _oh._

Keith watches them disappear down the corridor and thinks, he’s not the only one who’d lost someone on Kerberos.

A noise from Iverson’s office startles him, and as quietly as he’d come, Keith bolts out of the command building. He doesn’t stop until he’s out the fence, past the blind spot in the floodlights. He runs and runs until he’s well away from the Garrison and the unceasing tick-tock reminder of loss within its walls.

The pain from the stitch in his side is only secondary. Keith hunches over himself, fingers curled over his ribs until his breathing steadies.

The night is cold, cold, cold as he makes his way to the unused outpost by the fringes of the Garrison territory. The floor is hard underneath him as he sinks down, curling in on himself. Everything is quiet.

He stays out until almost-sunrise, this time.

 

(The red string is fading, just a little, just a little.)

 

Friday finds him leaning against the hoverbike, parked a little ways away from the entrance to Katie’s school. He’d begged off sick from his afternoon classes, and something in the way he’d looked had won some sympathy from Major Dinh, because she lets him off. He’d made his way back to the dorms, then snuck out, and now he’s here – except he’s still not quite sure what _for._ He hasn’t got much of a plan beyond finding Katie and getting her to talk to him. But something’s compelling him to be here.

If there’s any chance at all, any way, anything for Shiro—

A bell rings shrill through the air, signalling the end of the school day, and Keith takes a breath.

He finds Katie a few minutes later.

She’s one of the first out of the gate, alone, big bag on her back. Something about the way she carries herself reminds him painfully of Matt, and for a moment Keith almost balks. Almost turns and leaves and forgets he’d even wanted to try.

But Matt might be out there, still, and Dr. Holt, and Shiro.

(The red string around his finger, faded, translucent, but still there, still there, still there.)

So Keith steels himself, and weaves through the crowd of students towards her.

“Katie?”

The look she wears when she turns is sharp, wary, even when she catches sight of him. But after a few seconds her eyes widen, and she stops.

“Oh,” she says, and her voice echoes the cracked feeling inside of him.

“Katie.” He stumbles to a halt a few feet away from her, mouth opening and closing a few times as he tries to come up with something to say. “I’m—”

“Keith.” She stares at him, big eyes and fidgeting fingers. “You’re Keith.”

They stand for a few moments, looking at each other, uncertain. Keith feels more than a little terrified. But as he meets her gaze, he knows she understands.

He swallows against the dryness in his throat, and breathes.

“Can we talk?”

 

They end up at a nearby park, cradling vending machine sodas in their hands. Katie takes one of the low swings, feet kicking over the worn-down ground underneath. Keith leans against the adjacent jungle gym and watches the water condensing on the side of the can.

It takes him a while to talk, but he’s infinitely grateful that Katie doesn’t press. She just sits there quietly and waits for him to be ready.

Keith clutches his can until his palms go cold and damp. He exhales, weary.

In quiet, careful words and hesitations, Keith tells her. Why he thinks – _knows,_ that Shiro is still alive, still somewhere out there. Why he’d come looking for her. Why he’s here.

His hands shake, and the red string trembles with them.

“And I think—” He breaks off, choosing his words carefully. “If Shiro’s still out there, then Matt and Dr. Holt could be, too. They could still be alive.”

Half of Keith resents himself for this – hope is like water, able to give and able to ruin. He knows the danger of telling her when his words could easily turn out to be completely untrue. He knows he’s being selfish bringing this to her, asking, when his only certainty is Shiro and even then – even then—

He purses his lips, squeezes his eyes shut. Tells himself all of them, the whole of the Kerberos crew, still have a chance.

(Half of him resents having to admit to anyone else that Shiro is his soulmate, that Shiro is _his._ It leaves him feeling too raw and shattered. It leaves him too conscious of how he stubbornly sticks to present tense, tries to paper over the splintered feeling in his ribs.)

When he finally glances up, Katie’s looking at him in a way that cuts him right to the bone. Her eyes are wide; her mouth open just a little, like there are a dozen different things she might say but she doesn’t know where to begin. She looks like she’s forgotten how to breathe.

“Are you—” Her voice stumbles. “Are you sure?”

Keith meets her eyes. He flexes his left hand. Exhales.

“Yes,” he says. “Can you find them?”

 

He lets Katie in through the basement entrance of the command building. He should probably feel a little more guilty about allowing a young girl to sneak out on her own at night, but he knows both of them are too desperate to care. Keith volunteers as lookout while Katie steals into Iverson’s office again to find out what she can.

They get ten minutes before Keith hears voices from where he’s watching the stairwell. Alarmed, he creeps back to the corner round Iverson’s office but stops when he sees the lights are all on.

“—off my computer. How did you get past the guards?”

_Iverson._

Keith’s instinct is to immediately flatten himself to the wall. Katie’s voice rings out next.

“You said the spacecraft went down due to pilot error!” She sounds livid. “I saw the video feeds from the probes, there’s no evidence of a crash _anywhere_ on Kerberos.”

The world around Keith blurs and falls away.

_No evidence of a crash—_

_Pilot error—_

“—make sure every guard knows she’s never allowed on Garrison property, ever again.” Iverson’s words cut back in to Keith’s awareness like a break in static. He hears them drag Katie away, knows she’s struggling furiously. And he should help her, he should move, but his feet are rooted to the spot as the echo reverberates inside him over and over.

_No evidence of a crash._

“—I want to know how she got in and what files she accessed. We can’t have anyone else getting into classified information or else—”

Keith doesn’t hear what _else._ His whole body goes rigid as he whips around the corner, storming right up to where Iverson stands in the doorway to his office with two other guards.

“ _You said it was pilot error._ ”

Iverson whirls around, startled, eyes going wide and then narrowing in outrage when he recognizes who’s standing in front of him. But Keith doesn’t care, teeth bared and breath coming in a sharp, heaving, shaking in-out. All this time, _all this time._

“You should be in your dormitory, cadet,” Iverson grinds out.

“What’s the truth?” Keith demands, stepping right up to the senior officer’s face. The guards reach out immediately, making to pull him away, but Keith wrenches himself from their grip. “If there wasn’t a crash then it wasn’t pilot error, there’s _no way_ it would be, not with Shiro—”

“It is what we say it is, cadet,” Iverson barks, glaring at him. “The Kerberos mission failed due to an error on the part of Officer Shirogane and—”

“ _That’s not true._ ” Keith’s hand snaps out, grabbing Iverson’s lapels. The commander jerks back, balking, and the two guards abruptly haul Keith away. He twists, trying to get free, snarling. “Shiro would _never_ make a mistake, it’s not true, you’re _crucifying_ him because you don’t know—”

“That is _enough._ ” Iverson’s palm slams on the doorframe but Keith doesn’t even flinch. “Shirogane may have favored you but that isn’t going to fly with me, cadet. You will be suspended, and you will accept that Shirogane’s fuck-up cost the Kerberos crew their—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence.

Keith doesn’t even realize what he’s doing until his vision goes funny and his fist is headed right for Iverson’s face.

 

They expel him the next day. He doesn’t even get a disciplinary inquiry.

They let him take the hoverbike and a bag of his own stuff.

He finds the dog tags as he’s packing, scattered on his desk amid the mess. Keith picks them up, cradling them in his left palm.

(The red string keeps thinning out little by little by little.)

He slings them over his neck, tucked under his shirt, before he leaves.

 

In the end, he makes his way to the house in the desert.

He hasn’t been here in – months, _years._ Not since his last foster home, and definitely not since he’d gotten into the Garrison. He’d avoided coming here whenever he and Shiro had come out to the desert, but now he doesn’t have any other choice.

He doesn’t have much of anything left.

The place is covered in dust; it’ll take a while to clean out. He needs to take stock of what’s still usable, functional; of his supplies and what he’ll need to buy from town. He needs to figure out how to get himself a job; maybe get back into hoverbike racing. Something, anything to keep him going out here until Shiro gets back.

Shiro.

Keith walks back out onto the front porch. The bike is parked by the old tree, where the swing used to be. The railing needs patching up. Keith needs to make sure he’s still got running water.

He walks out until he’s by the fence, the cold desert air cutting into his skin through his jacket. Up above, the stars scatter out over the sky in a hundred different constellations, with all the empty space in between. Keith lifts his left hand, palm splayed out, blotting out some of their light.

The red string, faded as it is, trails from his finger, up and up.

Keith follows it out and thinks of Shiro and Shiro and Shiro.

 

He wakes up the next morning, and the next, and the next.

He goes back to what he knows best, what he’s made himself from: survival.

He has to keep going, keep waiting.

 

Shiro’s still out there. He has to believe it.

 

* * *

  

##  **Shiro**

 

The din of the arena throbs like something alive.

They scream and they scream, a thousand different voices. The words hammer at him like more blows, like they’re meant to bruise his skin. The noise beats at his body, bring out the pain in his head and his chest and his _arm—_

They’ve taken his arm. Whatever this thing is, now, that protrudes from his shoulder and glows violet and kills, it’s not his. It can’t be.

The crowd continues to scream. It’s not his name, or it wasn’t before but it’s all they call him now. It’s garbled in another language, but recognizable in All-Speak. It’s a word he knows.

 _Champion,_ they boom from the rafters, as a hulking beast lifts his arm in the air, blood dripping down to his elbow. _Champion, champion, champion._

Champion gazes forward, unseeing, exhausted. A red string trails down, gossamer thin, from his left hand.

They lead him out of the ring.

 

Back in his quarters, Champion slumps onto a stool. He scrubs the remains of the fight from his skin, the last of the blood and dirt caked under his fingernails. But no matter what he does, the red string remains. Faded, translucent, spinning off into somewhere Champion cannot trace.

But when he looks at it, something nudges at the edge of memory. Desert dust in the sunset. A night sky. Small, purple petals. Something warm.

Someone he needs to return to.


	3. now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ( _It’s good to have you back,_ he tells Shiro in the morning, as the day breaks over the desert. It feels pitifully inadequate, doesn’t encompass anything of how he feels and how much he wants to fall into Shiro and breathe him in and remember what it was like to have him. But it’s all he can say, and he hopes Shiro hears the rest.
> 
>  _It’s good to be back,_ Shiro says, smiling faintly, and the fractures inside Keith stay open.)

* * *

 

 

It’s half the pull of – whatever-it-is that Keith’s been feeling from the desert, that makes him look out across the desert and see the unidentified _something_ break the atmosphere and freefall to the ground. Keith watches it plummet, breath caught in his throat, terrified and hopeful and unable to breathe.

Something tugs at his left hand, something he wasn’t sure he’d ever feel again.

He doesn’t have much time to come up with a solid plan, but improvisation has always been his strength. He packs as many of the explosives he’s got at the shack as his bag can carry, straps the knife to its holster around his back. As an extra precaution, he wraps a bandanna around his face.

(The tags are still slung around his neck, tucked under his collar, warm from his skin.)

Then he kickstarts his hoverbike and takes off.

 

It’s laughably easy to take down the remaining Garrison officers and staff left in the quarantine tent. Keith knocks the last of them down with a well-placed roundhouse kick and rushes inside, trying and failing to tamp down the hope blooming in his heart.

There’s someone lying on an examination table in the middle of the room. Keith’s heart thuds wild in his chest as he reaches out with his left hand, turns a familiar face and—

“ _Shiro._ ”

The string on his finger is stark red, spinning out, and Shiro is right there and _real_.

 

He’s interrupted by two people, and Keith doesn’t need to see them in uniform to presume they’re Garrison cadets. They’re joined by a third person, a short boy with tufty brown hair and Keith freezes for a moment because he looks like Matt and _how—_

The kid glances around the room like he’s desperately searching and that’s when it hits Keith.

It’s Katie.

He sees the moment when she realizes there’s no one else, and her hopeful expression shatters. And he wants to go to her, pull her into a hug and – reassure her, somehow, maybe. But Shiro is here, breathing shallow and hanging limp between him and the other cadet, and Keith needs to get Shiro away _now._

Between him and the other cadet – Lance, although Keith’s memory of him is vague – they get Shiro out to the hoverbike. But the Garrison has apparently realized that the timed explosions he’d set were a ruse, and the squadron is headed back to the quarantine tent. There’s too many of them for the hoverbike, but they’re out of time and Keith won't leave Katie behind, which means not leaving the other two behind, so he grits his teeth and throws the throttles open as wide as they go.

They take off towards the open desert with the Garrison squadron in pursuit.

It takes some creativity on Keith’s part and a little cooperation from his passengers, but one by one they begin to lose the people on their tail. He launches the bike from one ledge to another in a slightly reckless maneuver, banking as soon as he can, though it’s difficult with the extra weight. But there’s one more vehicle after them, and Keith’s running out of options.

The cliff edge hurtles towards them, and Keith makes the decision easy.

“Is that... a cliff… up ahead,” the bigger cadet asks faintly.

Keith grins, just a bit. “Yup.”

They pitch off the ledge into a free-fall.

( _The first time Shiro had let him pilot the hoverbike—)_

He pulls up just before they hit the ground, letting the rebound force steady them out, and speeds off.

No one follows.

 

There’s only one place for them to go, so reluctantly, Keith takes them all to the shack.

It’s a combined effort for Keith, Lance, and the other guy – Hunk – to get Shiro up into the shack and onto the couch. Keith tucks him in with a spare blanket while the others trudge off. He’s rather selflessly offered the spare room for them to sleep in, although he knows he won’t be able to rest. The red string is a searing point of warmth on his finger, reminding him over and over that Shiro is _here_ and real and – and not gone.

Keith places a spare set of clothes on the low table by the couch – his father’s, the only things he has that might fit Shiro – and sits down carefully beside them, looking Shiro over. Even in the dim light he can see all the ways the other boy has changed. Shiro’s – bigger, now, powerfully built in a way he hadn’t been before, even with all the training he’d had before leaving. The lines to him are sharper, harsher. A scar cuts across the bridge of his nose, and Keith wonders how many more hide under ragged clothes.

He wants to touch Shiro, but there’s a terror crawling under his skin, that if he reaches out, Shiro will disappear.

A shuffling noise behind him makes him flinch. He jerks around, searching for the intruder.

Katie stands in the doorway, giving him a tight, sheepish smile.

“Is he…” She trails off, gesturing uncertainly.

Keith exhales, trying to force the tension from his shoulders. “Asleep,” he says, glancing back at Shiro on the couch.

There’s a long moment of silence, then Katie coughs. “He was the only one there, wasn’t he.” It’s not a question.

Keith looks at her, sees what she’s not saying in her expression – that she knows the answer but she’s begging it to be otherwise. Part of him feels guilty for the relief that’s still tight in his throat from having Shiro back, because Katie’s lost people too.

Instead of answering, he pats the empty space beside him on the table. Katie hesitates for a moment, then shuffles over. She tucks herself against Keith and he’s reminded of how unbearably _young_ she is, younger than when he himself had come to the Garrison. He wraps an arm around her shoulder, squeezes her to his side.

“We’ll find out what happened,” he says quietly, trying to sound surer than he feels. Trying to comfort. Shiro’s always been better at this than him, and he struggles to find something to say that’ll reassure her. “We’ll find them, Katie. Somehow.”

He feels her trembling in his grip, grief resurfacing. The only thing he can do is hold her closer. The silence settles between them again, punctuated by her muffled, hiccuped crying. Keith focuses on the rise and fall of Shiro’s chest.

“Pidge,” she says eventually, voice hoarse. Keith turns to frown at her, confused, but her gaze is fixed on the floor. She clears her throat, rubs her nose. “I changed my name to get into the Garrison, see if I could find anything else. It’s Pidge – Pidge Gunderson.”

Keith stares at her in disbelief for a few moments before exhaling a smile. Gods, she’s a plucky one. “Explains the haircut,” he quips lightly, and it wins him a weak chuckle.

“And the glasses,” she adds, pushing them up her nose. She straightens up, and Keith lets his arm fall away. The sky outside is starting to lighten, streaks of blue and grey on the horizon.

“You should rest,” he says, nudging her on the shoulder. “I’ll let you know when he’s up to talking.”

She hesitates for a moment, then stands up. He watches her shuffle off to join the others. But she pauses in the doorway, turning to him with a softened expression.

“Keith,” she says, and he can tell the smile is an effort but it’s genuine. “I’m glad he’s back.”

He meets her eyes, and the look on her face tells him that everything he’s feeling – the heartache, the relief, the terror – is written all over him. He opens his mouth, but it’s a while before he finds anything to say. Pidge doesn’t press.

“Yeah,” Keith says eventually. He swallows around the dryness in his throat. His left hand flexes, open-close, red string pulled tight. The right one flattens over his chest, pressing the tags into his skin. “I am too.”

 

( _It’s good to have you back,_ he tells Shiro in the morning, as the day breaks over the desert. It feels pitifully inadequate, doesn’t encompass anything of how he feels and how much he wants to fall into Shiro and breathe him in and remember what it was like to _have_ him. But it’s all he can say, and he hopes Shiro hears the rest.

 _It’s good to be back,_ Shiro says, smiling faintly, and the fractures inside Keith stay open.)

 

Keith’s not sure what tips him off, really.

Maybe it’s the way Shiro talks to him, lacking the ease of familiarity and openness. Maybe it’s the way he doesn’t lean into Keith’s spaces, doesn’t orient himself around Keith the way Keith does to him, a comet pulled from orbit. Maybe it’s the way Shiro looks at him, without the soft crinkles at the corners of warm brown eyes; without the playful quirk, as if he and Keith share a joke that no one else understands.

Whatever it is, between finding the Lion and warping through space to galaxy unknown and discovering a ten-thousand-year-old Altean castle, Keith looks at Shiro and realizes: _he doesn’t remember._

He expects it to cut like a dagger, to dig in and slice him open. Instead, it’s like a bloom of splinters and ice in his lungs, crackling sharp in a hundred different places and throttling him.

He wonders if the red string is still there, around Shiro’s finger. If a soulmate has fallen out of love – has forgotten that they love – would the string even still hold?

(Could it even exist, this far out in space?)

But all of that gets set aside as the weight of Voltron falls over them, both a mantle and a chain. _Defenders of the universe,_ the Altean princess, Allura, calls them. Things happen quickly, too quickly, but Keith’s grateful in a way. All he has to do is react, adapt – to being all the way in the far reaches of space, to the reality of aliens and sentient combat space lions; to the threat of the Galra and the war against them.

All he has to do is keep surviving.

(Shiro mentions, once, how hard it had been to survive in Galra captivity. Keith tastes acid almost before he can swallow down his words and the way he wants to tell Shiro, unfairly, scathingly: there is a difference between surviving in prison and survival being your whole life.

But it’s not Shiro’s fault.)

So Keith tries not to look too much at Shiro as they retrieve their Lions; as they train to use them, to fight together. So many times it’s all too easy to fall into familiar things – during combat training, during lunch, during the lulls when he forgets and looks for Shiro only to find that Shiro’s turned away. And each time, he hesitates, then withdraws.

He sets himself aside, along with the disquiet of his heart.

 

Training and combat become welcome distractions, the agitation picking at Keith’s already-frayed composure so much that when the Galra come, he’s practically raring to fight. These creatures took Shiro from him, hurt Shiro, and they’re hurting others too, all across the universe.

The victory is a struggle, but a victory nonetheless.

Allura insists they celebrate, even opens the castle to the Arusians. The good mood lasts all of a few hours before Pidge announces that she wants to leave. Keith stares at her in disbelief as she tells them she already has a plan, has things ready.

“You can’t _leave_ ,” he insists, stalking up to her. The suffocating feeling creeps back up his throat, makes his hands shake. It feels like he’s inches from flying off a cliff again, teetering on the edge of a plummet.

Pidge glares back at him. “ _You_ can’t tell me what to do,” she retorts, and the fury blooms in Keith’s chest.

“If you leave,” he bites out, looming over her, “we can’t form Voltron. And that means we can’t defend the universe against Zarkon. You’re not the only one with a family. All these Arusians have families, _everyone_ in the universe has families—”

“Yeah, I have a family—” Hunk cuts in, and Keith’s jaw clenches, brow furrowing, as the ice crackles in his lungs and everything is too loud, too much, too overwhelming. He snaps.

“You’re putting the lives of _two people_ over the lives of everyone else in the entire galaxy—” and Shiro grabs his arm but Keith’s already caught sight of the stricken expression on Pidge’s face. Guilt and mortification pool heavy in his gut as he realizes what he’s just said – and to _Pidge,_ of all people.

(He can still picture the fraught hope written all over her face when he’d first come to her, after Kerberos, after the shattering quiet. The way her voice had shaken as she’d asked, _are you sure?_ )

Shame makes his shoulders slump as he stares at the floor.

His apology is to let her go.

 

(Except she doesn’t get to leave. Except the Galra attack _again,_ almost take the castle; except Keith almost lets his desperation to put some distance between himself and Shiro cost the team everything. Except Pidge saves them all and they capture Sendak.

And Pidge decides to stay.

 _Good to have you back on the team,_ he says, and when she smiles at him, he knows she understands.

If only the rest of everything were so easy.)

 

They've departed Arus when Pidge comes to him, expression gentle and sad.

“Are you going to tell him?” she asks, coming to sit next to him by the huge windows of the observation deck. Keith likes coming here when he needs to quiet his head; there's always something reassuring about cosmic insignificance, and here he can remind himself how small he is to the whole of the universe.

He's found out one more thing, too, while looking out at the stars. Shiro’s helped prove it well enough. Soulmate threads still exist out here, in the vacuum of space, light-years away from Earth. Soulmate bonds still exist even when one person has forgotten.

He doesn’t ask why or how she’s figured it out; he knows now she’s more perceptive that he’s given her credit for. Instead, he lets her lean into him, and keeps looking out the windows.

_Are you going to tell him?_

Keith contemplates the pain of having Shiro not know, against a fight for the liberation of the universe and the way Shiro’s still clearly haunted by everything he’s been through. It's an easy win.

He smiles; his left hand closes into a fist. He doesn't look at Pidge.

“No.”

 

.o0o.

 

Shiro stands by the windows of one of the castle’s observation decks, and looks at the red string around his finger.

He still doesn't know what it means or what it's for. A brief line of questioning with Allura and Coran reveals it's nothing Galra, or nothing they know of, although admittedly their knowledge is 10,000 years out of date. But the more Shiro looks at it, the more he – not exactly _understands._ He knows, somehow, intuitively, that the string is from sometime _before._ Before his escape from the Galra, before his capture.

(Desert dust in the sunset. A night sky. Small, purple petals. Something warm. Someone he needs to return to.)

His only other recourse is to ask Keith or Katie – or _Pidge_ , rather; the only two people he has that he remembers. But he can't bring himself to talk to Pidge about it, not when he still carries the guilt of losing her father and brother, of being unable to protect them or help her find them. She carries enough of a burden.

But if he's honest – really, fully honest, not something he does a lot these days – he also knows: he doesn't want to show his cracks. He's uncertain enough, fractured enough; the rest of them don't need to see for themselves. Pidge and Hunk and Lance – bad enough that they've been launched into space with little to no training and no knowledge of what it is they're facing. Bad enough that they're confused, terrified, and terribly young.

No, Shiro can't afford to be less than infallible.

And then there's Keith.

Shiro thinks about what he remembers of Keith: a scrappy kid, a damn good flyer. No punches pulled, not even in sparring matches. Wide, stunning violet-grey eyes.

Shiro looks at Keith and what comes to mind is _unrelenting._ He can just about picture a stubborn, gangly boy in a flight simulator, trying again and again to get the landing right. Keith walking through a room with his head held high.

Something unrelenting and magnetic.

Perhaps Shiro might ask Keith what the string means, but Keith seems – distanced, somehow. Guarded. Sometimes Shiro catches Keith watching him only for the other boy's expression to inexplicably shutter, shoulders folding tight and gaze cutting away. Sometimes Shiro turns on reflex to ask Keith a question, share a thought, touch him, maybe, but Keith isn't beside him and Shiro doesn't know why he'd expected Keith to be. Sometimes Shiro looks at Keith and thinks about inevitabilities.

But while Keith is vocal about supporting Shiro and following him; while Keith stands resolute as his literal and figurative right-hand man; while Keith is unwavering and fierce in his dedication to their adopted cause—

Shiro’s mouth twists as he exhales a sigh. He doesn't know why he instinctively expects to find no walls when he reaches out to Keith, just that he does.

No, Shiro thinks as he turns his hand back and forth, watching the red string – still a little faded, but still very much here – twist with his motions.

No, he can't ask Keith, either.

 

(Still, when he catches Keith looking out the castle windows, over the blue ocean of Arusia that reminds them all painfully of home – Keith's expression is closed off, but something about him feels… brittle, maybe. Breakable. Broken.

Something nags at the edge of Shiro's memory, like he's left something behind. Something he'd promised to return to.)

 

Shiro knows, objectively, that time should work a little different this far out in space, but everything still feels like it passes far too quickly. Arriving on Arusia; meeting Allura and Coran; separating to find the Lions and then reconverging to bring them all together. Training to fight as Paladins of Voltron, to face the oncoming threat of the Galra.

It’s not lost on Shiro, the bitter irony that he’d spent months trying to escape the Galra and now he’s preparing to take them head on. But he’s here now, and if nothing else, he’s going to help ensure they don’t hurt anyone ever again.

So he trains. He tries to lead them, uncertain as he is. Tries to help prepare them for the empire they’re going to take down. Tries to set aside the way Keith makes a room feel whenever he enters – like the crackle of lightning in the air, ahead of a desert storm.

He succeeds at most things, mostly.

Just not with Keith.

Shiro chances a glance at the other boy where he’s seated across, legs neatly folded and spine rigid. They’re on the floor of the training room again, mind-linking… circlet things on their heads. Keith’s formed a visual of the shack, the one he’d been living in since leaving the Garrison. He hasn’t yet let on anything further, although Shiro can’t really fault him. Shiro exhales, already drawing his attention away to call to mind his own focus memory – the Kerberos launch – when the visual in front of Keith flickers.

The shack fades, replaced by a stretch of desert from a high vantage point. Then the town of Pieira, by the Garrison. Then the Kerberos launch, the ship gleaming in the sunlight. Then Keith makes a small, frustrated noise and it reverts to the shack.

Everything is blink-and-miss-it quick, but Shiro is looking.

That visual of the Kerberos launch is the same as his.

Shiro watches as Keith’s visualization continues to come in and out of focus, like an old television. The furrow in his brow deepens as he tries to center himself, to force the memory into coalescing. Shiro doesn’t realize he’s leaning forward, hand raised slightly, like he wants to reach out, until Coran calls his name.

“Shiro?”

Abruptly, Keith’s visual cuts out completely. Shiro startles out of his daze, flinching back. The others open their eyes.

“What… was all that,” Hunk says tentatively, looking around the room.

“Keith’s messing up, is what happened,” Lance snaps, scowling.

“Lance,” Shiro says reprovingly, but Keith’s already getting up and removing the circlet from his head.

“Sorry,” he says insincerely, dropping the circlet to the floor. “I think I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

He walks out of the room, unmindful of everyone’s protests. Or almost everyone – Shiro’s surprised when Pidge removes her own circlet and heads off after him.

Coran clucks in disapproval, going on about how important it is for them to _bond_ and _be open with each other._ Lance is sniping to Hunk about Keith being irresponsible. Allura doesn’t look pleased. Shiro sighs.

“Look, it’s been a long last couple of days,” he says, cutting Lance off and glancing pointedly at Allura. “I think we’re all tired. Let’s call it a night, and try again tomorrow.”

He waits until everyone assents, then removes his own circlet and gets up. Lance and Hunk shuffle off to go prepare dinner; Allura turns to convene with Coran. Shiro stands, fiddling with his circlet, left hand closing and unclosing over it. He looks to where Keith and Pidge had gone.

He hadn’t missed the way Pidge had looked at him before she’d left the room.

 

Nighttimes – or whatever passes for nighttime, out here in deep space – often find Shiro out of bed.

It’s – a lot of things, really. Nightmares, for one, although he never quite remembers what’s in them, just the gripping terror wrapped tight around his throat when he wakes up. A restlessness in his bones, a resistance to sleep; an instinct to stay awake that thrums static under his skin. An overwhelming number of uncertainties and insecurities that pick at the periphery of his consciousness.

(The red string around his finger, and all the things he can’t remember.)

Usually he whiles the night away working out, doing push-ups and sit-ups and going through a well-worn routine. Sometimes he heads out to the bridge, looks out the high windows at skies and constellations he doesn’t recognize. Tonight, he wanders the corridors of the castle, absentmindedly dragging the knuckles of his left hand along the wall.

He ends up in the Black Lion’s hangar.

He has to admit, he’s still – unsure about being her Paladin. Part of him still wishes Allura had assumed command herself, or that the Lion had rejected him somehow. Part of him wants to turn tail and run, as far away from the Galra as the universe can take him. Part of him is frightened, doubtful, angry.

But he also remembers what he’d told Pidge – what her father had told him, when he’d admitted to Dr. Holt that he was half-terrified of piloting them to Kerberos.

 _Go,_ and Shiro can still see Sam smiling warmly at him, clapping him on the shoulder and nodding to the ship. _Be great._

There’s a tiny rumble at the back of his mind, and he looks up at the Black Lion.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, smiling despite himself, a tiny curl of his mouth. “I hear you.”

He leaves the hangar feeling a little more… settled, maybe. He takes the long way back to his room, thinking about nothing in particular, when the string around his finger gives a little tug.

He frowns at it, confused, before the sound of a scuffle distracts him.

On high alert – they’re not safe, after all, not if the Galra are looking for them – Shiro quietly makes his way down the hall to the source of the sound. His posture eases when he realizes he’s headed for the training room. Perplexed, Shiro peers inside to find Keith engaged in a fight with one of the castle gladiator bots. He stops in the doorway, meaning to call Keith out and tell him to rest (not that Shiro has room to talk) but the words never make it out.

He’s never remembered Keith training with a sword, but the other boy still wields his bayard as an extension of himself, swinging it with ease to block the gladiator’s attack before dodging to the side. He fights with an almost-grace, all agility and momentum. Shiro watches Keith take a hit from a gladiator and ride out the force, sweeping his leg back so he eases to a halt a few feet away. Then he’s charging forward, ducking under the gladiator’s outswinging hit and slashing upwards in one smooth motion.

 _There goes your boy,_ Matt’s voice suddenly says in his head, and Shiro flinches.

“Shiro?”

He blinks, refocusing to find Keith looking at him with a concerned frown. The gladiator has disappeared to wherever they’re stored in the castle system. Keith swipes a hand over his face, chest heaving as he catches his breath. He’s watching Shiro expectantly.

“Sorry,” Shiro says belatedly, shaking his head a bit. “I just – I heard all the noise, so I came to check and make sure things were okay.”

Keith hums in acknowledgment, sheathing his bayard. He stands there a few moments longer, staring into middle distance, before turning back to Shiro.

“Are you,” he starts, then closes his mouth. His left hand flexes at his side. “Are _you…_ okay?”

Something in Keith’s voice makes Shiro think it’s not the question he wants to ask, but Shiro doesn’t know how to pry. So he settles for giving Keith a dry smile that probably misses _reassuring_ by a few feet.

“Just couldn’t sleep,” he says lightly. “I was heading back to my room, though. You should, too.”

Keith tilts his head, expression skeptical and unimpressed. Shiro’s abruptly knocked sideways by the familiarity of it. Like he’s seen Keith make that same expression countless times before.

( _I’m not here to sell you out._ )

“In a bit,” Keith says, and Shiro’s struck by the sudden urge to reach out to him, grab his wrist, as something tugs at his chest, visceral and unignorable. His left hand clenches.

“Just…” Shiro trails off, unsure of what he'd wanted to say. Keith turns wide, violet-grey eyes on him and it’s like he’s – searching for something. Shiro’s mouth twists and he exhales a sigh. “Make sure you get some rest, Keith.”

The other boy’s expression shutters again. He withdraws, a gesture that Shiro finds almost painful. Discomfited, he gives Keith another half-smile and turns away.

“Good night, then.”

 

Things happen very, very quickly after that.

They survive a Robeast attack.

They celebrate with the Arusians.

The Galra attack the castle. The team captures Sendak.

They retrieve a crystal from the Balmera.

They fight another Robeast.

Shiro confronts Sendak. Terror gets the best of him. They almost lose the castle, and Allura loses the last of her father.

And in all this is Keith, and the way Shiro keeps being inexplicably drawn to him. Keith and the walls he keeps up high, even when they’re all in their Lions, connected by their bonds. Keith and the way he keeps them all at arm’s length.

(The way he makes Shiro feel like a desert lightning storm.)

The red string sits more solid now, around Shiro’s finger.

 

Shiro losing Allura is something of a tipping point.

It’s not his fault. Objectively, he knows this. Capture was always a risk; there was every chance they’d be caught. There was nothing he could have done when Allura had bodily thrown him into the escape pod, sacrificing herself as a decoy for Shiro’s escape. He can’t find a Galra battle fleet on his own.

It’s not his fault, but Shiro still feels like it is. Helplessness has never sat well with him, not before and not now.

They need to get her back.

They’re halfway to doing that when a particle barrier closes around them, trapping them in with the Central Command Ship. A blast of dark energy hits Voltron with a sound like a shriek just at the edge of hearing, and suddenly all the Lions are separated.

In the Black Lion, Shiro breathes splinters as a shadow seems to settle around him. He has all of a few moments before he hears Zarkon in his head, stark and forceful and powerful.

_Mine._

Then he’s thrown out, crashing into the command ship, and his control over the Lion is gone.

Haggar finds him.

Fighting her is an exercise in desperation. She calls him _Champion,_ and there’s a din of an arena in his ears as he whirls around, trying to find her. She surrounds him, magic giving her every advantage, and her laughter echoes in his head like it’s trying to claw into his skull. Panic clenches his throat and then _something_ does – and then _he_ does, this facsimile of himself, every terror come to life as he looks at himself and sees glowing eyes, teeth bared and grip merciless.

The shadow closes around him and for a moment Shiro’s sure he’s lost.

The wound at his side throbs with an ache that sears him to the bone.

The red string burns tight.

 

All of that pales in comparison when he sees Zarkon headed right for the Red Lion, weapon raised, and Shiro realizes that he could lose Keith.

The Red Lion is unmoving, her pilot unresponsive, as Shiro dives in to pick them up.

 

He doesn't think he'll breathe easy until the castle is far, far away from the command ship, from Haggar and Zarkon and everything that could hurt them.

And then he doesn't breathe at all as the wormhole breaks down, and all of them are thrown out into space.

 

.o0o.

 

The Castle of Lions finds Shiro and Pidge first.

They’re stranded together on what is essentially a cosmic junk heap – Shiro’s frankly astounded at the amount of debris that’s somehow turned up at this one point of the universe. He’s actually a little curious if things just end up here somehow, drifting across space, or if this section of space magnetizes it all somehow. It might be an interesting thing to investigate, in the long run, and he tells Pidge as much as she pokes around the floating scrap.

“Huh.” Her expression turns contemplative as she looks around them. “That’d be _fascinating,_ actually – like if space and distance dilate somehow, maybe? If this is some sort of space Bermuda triangle, and maybe—”

This is where she starts to lose Shiro, going off on more technical details and theorizing. It’s times like these that she really reminds him of Matt; the same infectious delight, the same unceasing curiosity. He really hopes Matt is okay and out there somewhere. He owes it to both of them to reunite them.

“—and – huh, who’re you?”

Startled, Shiro whirls around, arm coming up in defense. Their Lions are dead in the water at the moment, unresponsive, so they have to defend themselves. But Pidge is just poking at what looks like a floating loofah, but with eyes. In fact, there are dozens of them, small pastel-colored fuzzy… _things_ that are gathering around them curiously. He hopes they’re not hostile. It would be terrible for things this fluffy to be hostile.

“Did we disturb you? Is this your home?” Pidge holds her hands out, coaxing one green puffball to her palm. Shiro winces, braced for – something, anything, but the puffball simply hovers over her fingers and sways slightly from side to side. He sighs, unwilling to completely let his guard down.

“Sorry for crashing out here in our giant combat space lions,” Pidge goes on, smiling. “We’re trying to get back to our friends, so if you have any way to help, let us know, yeah?”

The puffball looks at her, them seems to… vibrate, somehow. It sets all the others off, and the air is filled with a strange, tinny humming. The puffballs all take off in one direction, a little ways out in the debris field.

There’s a metallic noise from behind them, and both Shiro and Pidge turn to find the particle barriers forming over both their Lions. Shiro exhales sharply in relief while Pidge whoops in delight.

“Hey, you’re working again!” she calls, waving her arms excitedly. “Welcome back!”

“That’s a relief,” Shiro adds, walking up and patting the barrier around the Black Lion. He feels her rumble at the back of his mind, and smiles. Pidge is a little more unrestrained, hopping forward before accidentally catching her foot on a loose wire.

It trips her, sends her flying past the Green Lion and into some more piled-up debris. Shiro winces, picking his way towards where the scrap is dispersing around her. Then he notices her gesturing him over, arm flailing wildly.

“Shiro!” Pidge hoists herself up from the chunk of metal she’d been slumped on. “Shiro, _look!_ ”

He looks.

It’s a satellite dish.

Pidge grins. “I have an idea.”

It takes a few hours to find all the pieces and materials they need, but the junk heap is extensive and Pidge has always been good at improvising. Soon enough they have a pile of scrap parts that Shiro helps arrange on top of the Green Lion in an improvised satellite transmitter. The puffballs follow them everywhere, hovering and humming. Shiro hates to admit it, but he’s taken something of a liking to them.

There’s a reddish one that flits around by his ankles, bouncing a little as it goes. The markings around its eyes look like eyebrows, and he’s reminded a little of Keith.

( _So where'd you learn to fly like that?_ )

Shiro pauses in the middle of stringing a cable up. He really hopes Keith’s okay. The rest of the team, too, wherever they all are.

By the end of the construction, both he and Pidge are out of breath, panting and leaning against their Lions for support. Shiro’s hand clutches at the wound on his side, which is still faintly purple and throbbing under the shredded remains of his plackart. He grimaces, wincing as he probes the ragged flesh. It feels bizarrely cold to the touch.

(The red string shifts as he moves his left hand, pulling taut, a point of warmth.)

“Hey… you okay?” Shiro looks up to find Pidge peering at him in concern, a small furrow in her brow. He tries for a reassuring smile, tries not to flinch too hard as he stands.

“It’s fine,” he says, a little strained. She looks unconvinced, but he waves away any further questions. “The medpods can take care of it when we get back to the castle.”

She frowns at him a little more, but acquiesces. Then she takes a deep breath and looks up.

“Wanna see if we can get this running?”

 

It takes two false starts, but when Shiro and Pidge both get their Lions to channel their power out, the satellite turns on. The roar of both Lions sends a shiver up Shiro’s spine. He tries to steady his breathing, tries to temper his hopes as Pidge hops into her cockpit and starts broadcasting their signal, looking for the Castle of Lions.

When the blue wormhole opens at the edge of the debris field, Shiro breaks into a grin. Pidge hoots inside her cockpit.

“You’re a genius,” he tells her, warm and sincere, as she emerges to wave at the approaching castle.

She turns to beam at him, winking.

“I know.”

 

They’ve gotten to Allura just in time.

They find Lance next.

Then Hunk.

 

They can’t find Keith.

 

“Anything?” Shiro asks, coming up behind Pidge where she stands on the bridge, typing into a holoscreen. She looks a little gaunt, but then again, they all do.

It’s been ten days since they’d been thrown out of warp, and six days since they’d found Hunk on a bizarre grey planet with small… bird-like… _things._ Hunk had called them porgs. He’d had one on each shoulder, plus his head, plus three more in his arms when they’d found him.

(He’s also declared that he’s going back to adopt some of them, which Shiro finds both a little odd and a little endearing.)

Pidge sighs and shakes her head sadly. “Nothing. I can’t find the Red Lion’s energy signal anywhere. Wherever she is, she doesn’t have enough power to broadcast to us.” She taps at the screen a bit more. “That or they’re both too far away.”

Shiro tries not to consider the implications of _not enough power_ too deeply.

“It’s fine,” he says, squeezing her shoulder. “Keith’s a survivor. He can take care of himself.”

It’s as much to convince himself as it is to reassure her. It does nothing to assuage the tightening clench of worry in his gut. Pidge looks up at him, distraught, clearly hoping he’s right.

Shiro straightens his shoulders and nods.

“We’ll find him.”

 

Six days becomes nine, becomes eleven.

Allura presses her lips into a thin line as she stands at the center of the bridge and again tries to focus, tries to search for the Red Lion and her quintessence. The longer they go without finding any trace of Keith, the more the splinters and ice bloom in Shiro’s lungs.

 _Keith’s a survivor,_ he tells himself, closing his eyes as Allura slumps against the controls and shakes her head again, frustration written over all her pretty features. Keith’s a survivor, he’s smart, he’s tougher than he looks.

But something nags at the edge of memory; there’s a prickling sensation on his finger as the red string pulls tight, tight, _tight._ He looks at it and is startled to find it’s begun to fade, a little more translucent than the day before.

( _I got you something._ )

His left hand closes into a fist. He looks at the holoscreens again, all the ways they’re trying to find Keith, and reminds himself to breathe.

( _So it doesn’t die._ )

“Where are you, Keith?” he says, quietly into the empty spaces around him.

 

It’s nineteen days before they find the Red Lion.

Or, more accurately, the Red Lion finds _them._

Allura picks up on it first; she looks up from where she’s scrolling through some data on the screen, eyes wide and shoulders tense. Then the main screen flashes with a hailing signature – with _the_ hailing signature, the one they’ve been searching for for almost three weeks.

“Is that—” Hunk starts, but Pidge is already rushing towards her own chair and holoscreen, tapping away hurriedly.

“It’s Keith!” she exclaims, looking up and around at all of them. “It’s the Red Lion, she’s broadcasting a signal, I can trace it. Hunk—”

“On it.” Hunk scrambles to his own chair, working with Allura and Pidge to track down the Red Lion’s signal, triangulate her position. Coran’s at the fore, opening maps and coordinate systems. Lance stumbles onto the bridge, jacket on inside-out.

“Did we—”

“It’s Keith.” Shiro hardly recognizes his own voice – it shakes with relief, with apprehension, with a feeling like a lightning strike. The red string feels like a brand; tense, a sharp sensation like a needle down to bone.

“I got him!” Pidge opens a comm line on the main screen.

It feels like the whole room holds its breath.

Shiro’s almost afraid to speak, to call out, but — “Keith?”

For a while, there’s nothing but the crackle of static, and Shiro feels like something’s pressing down on his chest. He inhales, exhales. Shuts his eyes.

“...iro?”

Opens them.

“ _Keith._ ” He feels the room around him breathe a sigh of relief. Allura and Pidge return to triangulating the Red Lion’s position. It’ll be easier so long as the comm line remains open. Shiro hopes Keith’s close enough for them to reach him soon. “Are you okay? How’s your Lion?”

The breathing on the other end of the line sounds forcibly steady. “Been better,” Keith says, and there’s a laugh there but it’s strained. Shiro feels the cold bloom in his ribcage. “Red’s – okay. She – I couldn’t—”

Keith breaks into a coughing fit that sounds terrifyingly wet and ragged. “I couldn’t raise her at first, she wouldn’t respond. I—”

A pained grunt.

“—s’okay now, but I can’t fly—”

A croaking gasp.

“—hurts—”

More coughing.

“Hey, hey.” Shiro darts a frantic glance at Pidge, who’s gone frighteningly pale. She’s typing even faster, doing – something, he doesn’t know, but he trusts her. Her and Allura both. Lance looks petrified; Hunk looks vaguely queasy. Shiro wets his lips, trying to find something, anything to say. “We got you, buddy, we’ll find you. You’re gonna be okay.”

The red string burns.

( _You're going to be so far away._ )

“Shiro…”

His nails dig half-moons into his palm. He can’t breathe. To his left, Pidge snarls and smacks the holo screen, surface rippling with force. “Come _on._ ”

“We’re on our way, Keith, just – hang in there, all right? Allura and Pidge just need to get your signal locked, then we’ll be on our way.” Shiro keeps talking, keeps trying not to let his voice shake. Everything about him shakes. His hands reflexively open-close by his sides. Inhale, exhale. “We’re going to find you.”

A rattle of breath and then—

“Keith?”

—silence.

 

“Keith?”

 

Shiro stares at the screen as the comm line goes quiet, with nothing but the crackle of static and the faint, faint sound of Keith breathing. He hears Pidge make a choked, desperate, angry noise; vaguely sees Allura slam her hands down on the console. Something squeezes his ribs; pools in his lungs until they burn and it feels like he's drowning.

( _You’re gonna do great, Takashi._ )

 

They’re unprepared for the Red Lion’s reaction.

They wormhole into the system, coming out by a dwarf planet on the fringe of an asteroid belt. It’s the furthest Pidge, Hunk, and Allura have managed to trace the Red Lion's energy signal; none of them can seem to pinpoint exactly where she is. Allura says the signal is too weak, that it's a miracle that the Lion had reached them at all. Pidge and Hunk are hoping being in the same system will help them track it down.

The four of them are all in their Lions, ready to hone in on Keith’s location once Pidge or Allura or Coran pick it up. There’s a low, persistent growl at the back of Shiro’s mind, a bleed of agitation and frustration. The Black Lion senses her pilot’s helplessness and anger, reflects it with her own. Shiro shuts his eyes and desperately searches their connections, trying to find something, _anything,_ any sign because Keith is _still here,_ if he just looks Keith will still be here—

It hits them like something physical, like something closing over their noses and mouths, suffocating and overwhelming. Shiro reels, gasping in pain, robbed of breath even if nothing is actually there. The agony reaches deep, sinks through skin and curls around his lungs, threatening to drown him.

The Black Lion shakes with the force of it, echoing the anguish until Shiro feels it rake down to his soul.

It’s the Red Lion.

She calls out to them again, less forcefully now, keening over their connection. If she had a voice, Shiro’s sure she would be pleading. He recovers first, resurfacing to the sounds of his fellow paladins crying out, confused and pained.

 _Where is he,_ he begs, frantic, eyes searching the seemingly-unending stretch of space ahead of them. _Where is he, I’ll find him, I’ll get him back safe—_

Keith’s Lion hears him, and she answers.

Red is part and parcel to Keith’s soul, connected to it and part of it, an easy give and take. And when Red gently nudges the edges of Shiro’s consciousness, with grief and frustration and a fierce resoluteness – tells him _you are the same_ – he understands.

Because Shiro is part of Keith’s soul, too.

 

(The red string around his left ring finger. Starlight in the night sky of the desert. An unwavering certainty and warmth.

Keith.)

 

The Black Lion is off before anyone can ask where Shiro's headed or how he knows.

He follows the pull, chases down the intangible _something_ that tugs at his chest, visceral and unignorable.

(From the very beginning, always and still: they have been drawn together. But Shiro doesn’t need a red string around his finger to know that he will always, always be drawn to Keith.)

He breaks through the atmosphere of the red, red planet to find the Red Lion crashed out by an outcropping, lying on her side and unmoving.

The other paladins are calling for him, but he presses on, heedless.

He’s out of his Lion almost before she touches the ground, running and running towards Keith.

 

When Shiro sees Keith curled up at the base of the pilot's seat, it stops him in his tracks, because Keith looks so – small, so unbearably fragile.

His footsteps echo in the cramped space as he makes his way over, so carefully, apprehensively.

Keith doesn't move.

 _No_ , Shiro thinks, dropping to his knees and reaching out, hands trembling. _Not like this, please, please, I haven't – don't take him away from me, I can't—_

Desperate, shaking fingers skitter over burning skin, searching, praying—

Weakly, faintly: a pulse throbs just under Keith's jaw. Shiro presses fingers to it like a lifeline, human fingers, his left hand.

The red string has pulled taut, a searing point of warmth, solid and real.

( _He's alive, he's alive, he's alive, he's alive_ ; like a drumbeat, like the frantic thud of his own heart. Keith is still here. Shiro hasn't failed him a third time.)

“Shiro?” Pidge's voice wavers over the earpiece in his helmet. She's waiting for him to check in, to tell her and everyone else if Keith's—

It takes a moment for Shiro to find his voice, stuck in his throat as it is, along with a hundred emotions and Keith's name. He gathers Keith into his arms so terribly gently.

“I've got him,” he answers, cradling Keith to his chest as he stands. “I’ll get him back to the castle. We’ll rendezvous there.”

There's a pause. Then, so painfully hesitant: “Is he...?”

Shiro shuts his eyes and steadies his breaths. Red presses against his consciousness, a reassurance and reminder.

“He's alive.”

 

Keith still looks so terribly small when they place him in the medpod. Shiro had undressed him, leaving him in just the black undersuit of their paladin armor. There are rents in the fabric, but even then too many things are covered up, and Shiro wonders just what the full cost was of Keith’s fight with Zarkon on that command ship.

( _Thank you for defending me._ )

Allura tells them all it will be a long while before Keith is healed, maybe longer before he’s conscious. Still, it’s difficult for everyone to be away from the room too long, as if they might leave and come back to find Keith gone again.

Shiro sits on the floor, hands twisting and fidgeting in his lap. He hasn’t left, won’t; in his head, he keeps seeing Keith curled on the floor, unmoving.

The dog tags are warm in his palm, chain looped around his fingers. They’re more well-worn now, scratched in a lot of places, but his name and designation number are clear as anything. Keith had been wearing them under all the layers of his armor. The ball chain had left an imprint on his skin.

( _I’ll get them back when we come home._ )

Shiro sits on the floor, and thinks about how Keith had kept these, all this time. He thinks about Keith.

It’s startling, the realization that he’d come to assume Keith would always be there, how he’s almost _expected_ Keith to always be there, an arm’s reach away. And now he almost wasn’t; now Shiro tries to imagine it, taking how he feels and spreading it out over days, weeks, a year, and without the hope he still has. He tries to imagine living week after week with the knowledge that Keith’s gone. It freezes something inside him, splinters and ice that choke, because he’d never even thought—

It’s the fight with Zarkon all over again, Shiro watching the Galra emperor raise the black bayard and go right for the throat.

It’s terrifying when he thinks about it, that Shiro’s always thought Keith would simply be there, and if he wasn’t then he’d come back.

Having that belief shattered is terrifying.

(And he thinks of Keith alone in a desert, wondering where Shiro’s body was, out amongst all the stars. Here, Shiro looks at that beautiful boy, so still – thinks about how his body had felt, crumpled in Shiro’s arms – and he doesn’t know how Keith had survived this.)

But the red string is there, tight and solid and stark around his finger, and Shiro breathes into empty spaces and reminds himself that Keith is alive.

 

The hours pass, turn into days. Shiro keeps waiting.

He talks, once. It’s dark aboard the castle, everyone gone to bed. Shiro splays his left palm over the glass, over Keith’s heart.

“You should have told me,” he says softly. Because he would have wanted to know, he should have known; because even if his conscious mind had forgotten, the rest of him had remembered all too well. Because things might have gone differently.

His words fall into the quiet.

 

One afternoon, when the silence is too overwhelming, when Shiro thinks he might fly apart watching Keith’s still body, he leaves the room. Wandering the corridors brings him back to the observation deck, looking out onto the planet where they’d found Keith.

Rhohak, Allura had called it.

He’s watching the suns start to set when Pidge finds him.

“Shiro?” Her voice is gentle, uncertain. He hears her walk up behind him, coming to stand with him by the windows. Shiro’s a little grateful for her presence. He doesn’t know if he can take being alone for the moment.

They stay like that, beside each other, as the suns inch their way below the horizons. Shiro breathes until the words unstick from his throat.

“The ocean,” he says, so quietly that Pidge almost doesn't hear it. But she does, and she turns to him, eyes wide, lips lightly parted. Shiro knows that she knows what he means. “I wanted to take him, after I got back. To the ocean. California.”

Pidge lays a careful hand on Shiro's arm, the Galra one. His hand clenches into a fist against the glass. The dog tags are heavy in his pocket. “I was gonna take him on a trip, just the two of us, get a few days leave. But I didn't—”

He cuts himself off, biting down on his lip. Pidge tightens her grip and presses against his side, a small comfort. “It wasn't your fault.”

“No.” Shiro exhales, leans his forehead against the glass; closes his eyes. Outside, the red desert of Rhohak stretches to the horizon, reminding Shiro so much of the Garrison and the firebright boy he'd found there. Red like Keith's Lion, like his jacket, like the thread that's tied them together across galaxies and loss. Shiro takes in another shaky breath. “But I still forgot.”

He had; he'd forgotten everything between them and left Keith to bear that burden for them both. Keith had shouldered something that the two of them were meant to share and he hadn't said anything, hadn't showed his cracks even as he'd patched up where Shiro had splintered. Keith hadn't even believed in soulmates when they'd first met, but he'd still put the full weight of his hope on a red string around his left ring finger, because it meant Shiro was still out there.

He'd stayed with Shiro, and hadn't asked for anything, didn't push for more than to be by Shiro's side.

The revelation of that kind of devotion – it shakes you down to your bones.

Shiro doesn't know how to even begin paying that back, how to apologize.

 _I probably don't deserve him,_ Shiro thinks, and almost laughs.

 

Keith wakes up early one morning, eyes blinking open on an exhale. As he slumps out of the medpod, Shiro’s there to catch him.

His body crumples into Shiro’s arms, warm and solid and real.

Shiro gathers him up carefully, one hand brushing Keith’s hair back as the other boy takes shallow, shaky breaths and looks around him. When he realizes who’s holding him, his eyes go wide.

“Shiro?”

(Like when they’d been standing outside the rec gym, the first time they’d formally met; when Shiro had taken them out over the desert on the hoverbike; when Keith had given him a small bloom of purple petals, pressed carefully between glass; when they’d said goodbye. Like every time Keith has said his name and made it sound like starlight.)

Shiro remembers now. Not everything, but enough.

He looks at where his left hand is clasped around Keith, and he can see the red string around his ring finger, knows it leads up to where Keith’s palm is pressed, warm, just to the right of his heart.

Part and parcel, to each other’s souls. He can believe that now.

Shiro smiles, soft.

 

“Hey, Keith.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, _thank you_ so much for reading! I hope you liked the story ❤︎ Come say hi on social media – I'm [@redluxite](https://twitter.com/redluxite) on Twitter ^ ^ Catch me posting a lotta WIPs, AUs/HCs, and updates on ongoing/future projects.


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